What happens to a pandemic in an isolated and hyperreal society?
As Baudrillard famously pronounced in his magnum opus, ‘Simulacra and Simulation’, we are now living in “the desert of the real” (p. 1). The COVID-19 pandemic has afforded us with stark reminders of this fact, as a televisualised world became our only world outside our houses in the early stages of lockdown.
This allows for a magnification of the process described in that work that forces people to become dependent upon “the analytical conception of the media on an external active and effective agent, on ‘perspectival’ information with the horizon of the real and of meaning as the vanishing point.” (p. 30) Indeed, death itself has assumed, in Heideggerian terms, an increasingly within-the-world demeanour, tranquilised with indefiniteness. This is precisely because of the proximity into which we are brought with it by mass media, the neutralisation of immediacy and existential arbitrariness.
The pandemic we experience is different to the virus that affects those we know, and it is one fundamentally forged in the “curved mirror” (p. 18) into which we are accustomed to stare. The importance of this is that we respond to it in terms forged by that very curvature, and what hope is there then?
Written by Oliver Haythorne
Artwork by Izzy Johns
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