I.
As a matter of fact, King Cnut wasn't a madman who believed he possessed supernatural powers that would allow him to turn back the tide. On the contrary, he was a wise and humble monarch who knew the limits of his own authority and wished to demonstrate to his courtiers that compared to the supreme power of God, the power of all men is vain.
Still, that's not how the legend is remembered or invoked within popular culture: and so, when it comes to Boris Johnson's desperate and deluded attempt to defeat (or at least control) Covid-19, we can rightly describe him as a bit of a Cnut; a man who dreamed as a boy of becoming world king now reduced to faffing about as the tide of events leaves him increasingly looking washed-up.
What the PM doesn't seem to appreciate is that whereas one can barricade oneself indoors in order to be safe from a pack of hungry wolves, the same strategy isn't going to work when faced with a viral threat. If he spent a little less time studying Churchill and a little more time reading Baudrillard, he might understand this ... [1]
II.
To his great credit, Jean Baudrillard was one of the first philosophers to conceptualise the viral mode and how it corresponds to a form of cultural chaos and confusion, spreading rapidly within a global system lacking immunity. For a viral agent like Covid-19 doesn't just infect individuals, but all sectors of society, including the government, the media, and the world of commerce, thereby exposing the interconnections between pathogens, wet markets, digital networks, etc.
The fascinating thing is not what Covid-19 does to the body, but what it does to the collective imagination. We might describe the hysteria surrounding the disease as a virtual symptom; one that is induced by the political class and the media and which massively inflates the actual threat posed by the virus. There's no point blaming Boris for this, or, indeed, anyone in particular. For our shared insanity "is a pyramidal synthesis of convergent effects, a phenomena in resonance" [2].
In sum: the current pandemic - just like terrorism - is a product of our own viral culture. And the fact that these things are not just matters of concern for our security services and medical experts but for us all, demonstates that they are not merely episodic events in an irrational world:
"They embody the entire logic of our system, and are merely, so to speak, the points at which that logic crystallizes spectacularly. Their power is a power of irradiation and their effect, through the media, within the imagination, is itself a viral one." [3]
As a matter of fact, King Cnut wasn't a madman who believed he possessed supernatural powers that would allow him to turn back the tide. On the contrary, he was a wise and humble monarch who knew the limits of his own authority and wished to demonstrate to his courtiers that compared to the supreme power of God, the power of all men is vain.
Still, that's not how the legend is remembered or invoked within popular culture: and so, when it comes to Boris Johnson's desperate and deluded attempt to defeat (or at least control) Covid-19, we can rightly describe him as a bit of a Cnut; a man who dreamed as a boy of becoming world king now reduced to faffing about as the tide of events leaves him increasingly looking washed-up.
What the PM doesn't seem to appreciate is that whereas one can barricade oneself indoors in order to be safe from a pack of hungry wolves, the same strategy isn't going to work when faced with a viral threat. If he spent a little less time studying Churchill and a little more time reading Baudrillard, he might understand this ... [1]
II.
To his great credit, Jean Baudrillard was one of the first philosophers to conceptualise the viral mode and how it corresponds to a form of cultural chaos and confusion, spreading rapidly within a global system lacking immunity. For a viral agent like Covid-19 doesn't just infect individuals, but all sectors of society, including the government, the media, and the world of commerce, thereby exposing the interconnections between pathogens, wet markets, digital networks, etc.
The fascinating thing is not what Covid-19 does to the body, but what it does to the collective imagination. We might describe the hysteria surrounding the disease as a virtual symptom; one that is induced by the political class and the media and which massively inflates the actual threat posed by the virus. There's no point blaming Boris for this, or, indeed, anyone in particular. For our shared insanity "is a pyramidal synthesis of convergent effects, a phenomena in resonance" [2].
In sum: the current pandemic - just like terrorism - is a product of our own viral culture. And the fact that these things are not just matters of concern for our security services and medical experts but for us all, demonstates that they are not merely episodic events in an irrational world:
"They embody the entire logic of our system, and are merely, so to speak, the points at which that logic crystallizes spectacularly. Their power is a power of irradiation and their effect, through the media, within the imagination, is itself a viral one." [3]
Ultimately, the fight against Coronavirus - just like the so-called war on terror - is futile and unwinnable and, like it or not, we're probably all going to get our feet wet sooner or later ...
Notes
[1] I'm referring here to Baudrillard's four modes of attack and defence: first come the wolves, a visible enemy who attack us directly and against whom we can construct solid defences and arm ourselves with rifles; then come the rats, a rapidly multiplying and subterranean enemy who burrow under our barricades and against whom we must use poison; next are the cockroaches, which do not attack so much as infest and get everywhere, including in the cracks between our defences, making it extremely difficult to ever fully exterminate them; finally, there are the viruses, an invisible enemy transmitted from person to person or in the air itself, infecting the body and requiring the development of a vaccine or acquired immunity. Resistance with lockdowns, face masks, and hand wash is simply a form of Cnutism. See Jean Baudrillard, Fragments, trans. Chris Turner, (Routledge, 2004), pp. 71-2.
[3] Jean Baudrillard, 'Aids: Virulence or Prophylaxis?, Screened Out, p. 6.
