Coronavirus, Politics and Fantasy

There were two different but I think ultimately related responses to the spread of the coronavirus which I found interesting. One was the attitude of Spectatorship. This is manifest in a number of ways. Someone at work (in March) said “it’s this month’s story, next month it’ll be something else.” And there were very similar expressions, such as “its been Brexit for god knows how long, now it’s all Corona Corona.” Its as if Coronavirus, Brexit and so on, exist “in the media”, exist on a kind of screen and “we” are only the observers of this spectacle which takes place, which unfolds, separately, and is organised by – and largely affects – others. We are not in the picture. The Second, albeit fringe response, is those who claim the whole thing is a “hoax”, or pretext; those who claim that They have got Us where They want us, in a position of fear and subjection. This is usually accompanied by pseudo hard facts, e.g. that the virus is comparable to the flu, and asserts that the extra measures are purely instruments of control.

These two responses are clearly related. 

The first assumes a relation of spectatorship with regard to the screen, whilst the second posits a They behind the screen. Or rather, the first alludes only to a kind of nebulous They behind the screen (“they’re saying we’ll go into lockdown on Friday” or whatever). The second offers a more localised and defined They, with malign intentions and power.

It is also understandable how the one attitude might flip into the other. We have, on the one hand, this screen, on which events unfold, and then, on the other, the homeostasis of everyday life, the auditorium from which we watch the screen. Occasionally, however, something appears which seems to come towards us, and to impinge on, to collapse, that distance we enjoy with regard to the screen. It threatens to come “too close” to the homeostasis of everyday life. 

Covid fell into this category. The prohibition, god forbid, on going to the pub, the wearing of masks and the keeping of distances. We were dealing with a part-suspension of everyday life, the “news” coming too close for comfort, to our front door and even into the home, destroying the distance. At this point, the They can be posited as something defined and malign, the They of the “hoax” brigade. 

This positing of something coming from Outside and disturbing everyday life perhaps then accounts for the alignment between the Hoaxers or self-declared sceptics and certain Brexit attitudes. 

The EU directives, which in the so-called popular imagination, the surrogate “popular imagination” in the tabloid press, took the form of arbitrary and irrational disruptions to everyday life – directives concerning the shape of bananas, speed limits on children’s roundabouts and so on. Their irrationality and arbitrariness was in fact a sign of their Otherness. 

The EU performed two roles in popular fantasy. On the one hand the arbitrary irrational directives, like certain versions of the Superego. On the other hand, the stealing of resources. This is not just any old stealing of resources. Those who steal are also enjoying this, laughing at us, “taking the piss”. That is, there is also, as part of the same amalgam, a national humiliation fantasy. 

Needless to say, and very obviously, the ‘stealing of resources’ fantasy, and its supporting “national humiliation” fantasy, is almost always allied to racism. ‘The immigrant’ is represented as draining the resources of .. the NHS.. the benefits system. Yes, he or she is doing this, but also relishing this. Always there is this figure of the mocking smiling Other. “We” are somehow being exploited, taken advantage of, and need to “stand up to” the Other stealing our resources. All of this, but briefly, is proto-fascistic. It performatively brings into being an enraged and humiliated “We”, primed for retaliation.

Regarding Covid, the measures brought in by states around the world did indeed suspend everyday life in various ways. This suspension of everyday life introduced as a result of the virus, is sometimes cited as a preparation for authoritarianism, not just by the Hoax brigade but by political commentators and philosophers. And yet, it seems to me, that the more authoritarian regimes, the Right-wing regimes, the overtly capitalistic regimes, were reluctant to impose effective measures, and in fact failed to do so. The places that introduced effective pre-emptive measures were the likes of Greece, Kerala, New Zealand. These places tended not to first ask the question “Is saving lives good for the economy?” 

I see the virus, coming as it did from the Outside, from outside politics, as a simple imperative. Or rather a meaningless intrusion to which the only proper response was an ethical imperative to save lives and alleviate suffering. A demand which one could either answer with appropriate measures or prevaricate and compromise. In this sense the virus acted as an instrument exposing the ethical poverty of Conservative priorities and ethics: “I’d rather die as a freeborn citizen doing the things that freeborn citizens do than cower like a dog in a kennel because the government has ordered me to do so”.

The state-engineered suspension of everyday life may well advertise the power of the state. That much is obvious. But it also demonstrates that the order of things can indeed be suspended, that its necessity is illusory. The abandoning of market mechanisms, temporary nationalisations, the discovery that the “magic money tree” does indeed exist...

Many people, when the so-called lockdown first began, were taken aback by the birdsong, the silence, the air. At the same time of course, something appalling and to a degree preventable was unfolding. But the pause, the parenthesis, the ingress of air, as if from Elsewhere was both literal and also the figure for an opening, a breech in the homeostasis of the everyday life, an interregnum wherein various new possibilities came within the radius of thought and action.