The Digital Pandemic

Imagination in Times of Isolation

João Pedro Cachopo

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350284302
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Filosofia etica e morale

A refreshing approach to the dominance of technology in our contemporary lives, The Digital Pandemic, translated from Portuguese, poses fundamental questions about love, fear, connectedness, proximity, imagination and consciousness. Arguing that the pandemic has ushered in a civilizational digital shock, João Pedro Cachopo charts new channels of relatedness and communication between people through digital technologies for the foreseeable future. The transformation of human experience that began in 2020 creates a break in our sociality that Cachopo pinpoints through key themes of love, travel, study, community and art. In contrast to the growing philosophical literature on the pandemic, this bold theoretical work does not prophesy the fall of capitalism or the end of personal freedom and relationships. Instead, this book carefully investigates the advanced technology that is increasingly inextricable from our lives, using an alternative approach that avoids pessimism, while remaining alert to the risks and threats of the digital age. It opens up the possibility of fostering global solidarity and consciousness beyond physical borders in the 21st century.

CHAPTER ONE

The scandal of philosophy in times of catastrophe

1. As time passes, our memories of the beginning of 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic broke out, are becoming less and less vivid. It is thus worth recalling the widely shared impression of witnessing a totally unexpected event, one that for my generation can only be compared, in terms of the perplexity it caused, with the collapse of the Twin Towers in 2001. The surprise that gripped the world turned swiftly to bewilderment and panic. What had happened? What kind of disaster was this? It was not a natural catastrophe like an earthquake, a tsunami or a meteorite. It was not an act of terrorism. It was not a stock market crash. It was a virus: invisible, like every other virus, but with a speed of propagation and a lethality that would prompt governments to take measures that would previously have been unimaginable. Above all, it was a virus about which worryingly little was known.

Establishing the truth about this new, insidious enemy was paramount. People needed to convert their doubts – the harbinger of fear – into certainty as quickly as possible. They buried themselves in avalanches of calculations, statistics, exponentials, curves, plateaux and peaks. The value of certainty itself – or simply the promise of certainty, the hope of certainty, the mere glimpse of anything that might possibly resemble a certainty – attained its own dizzying peak. The black market in home-made certainties, whether graphics, charts or remedies, boomed. In a time characterized by the hunger for certainty, a certain distancing is required from philosophy: a demand that it should not cede to the pressure to obtain answers.

Answers were needed, though, more than ever before: the moment called for medical, logistical and political solutions. Active public scrutiny of policy decisions as they happened was – and remains – necessary. People have denounced, rightly, the necropolitics prepared to sacrifice lives at the altar of economics; they have drawn attention, rightly, to the global dimension of the crisis and the need for international solidarity; and they have condemned, rightly, acts of authoritarianism ushered in by the climate of emergency. All of this was and remains fundamental. But if we do not need philosophy to understand it – and I do not think we do – then the question arises: what role might philosophy play under such circumstances? At a moment that demands the proximity associated with the intervention in the public sphere, how does the distance of philosophy express itself? To what extent is it useful or even, perhaps, necessary?

2. I want to examine some texts by Giorgio Agamben, which generated intense debate early in the pandemic. Before discussing the question he poses, I will consider Agamben’s error. This consisted in approaching the problem of the pandemic, which he branded an ‘invention’, as if he was possessed of certainty about its minimal severity.¹ He, a philosopher, did not and does not have the tools to establish the seriousness of the disease. Agamben reformulated his view in a later text, entitled ‘Reflections on the Plague’, in which he says, ‘the following reflections do not concern the epidemic itself but focus instead on what we can glean from human reactions to it’.² He goes on to outline the terms of the question I propose to explore:

They are, in other words, thoughts on how easily an entire society surrendered to the feeling of its being plague-ridden and accepted self-isolation and the suspension of its normal life conditions: its work relations and friendships, its connections to loved ones and to its religious and political beliefs. Why hasn’t there been, as would be quite imaginable and as usually occurs in these cases, opposition?³

I won’t discuss Agamben’s hypothesis that the ‘plague’ already existed, albeit unconsciously, in the form of discomfort with a profoundly misguided way of life, but rather the question he poses, which I consider to be accurate. This might sound perplexing. How is it possible for a question to be accurate, independently of the correctness of its answer and the validity of the hypotheses and suspicions that gave rise to it? This is precisely the claim I want to make to develop some wider points about the role of philosophy in times of catastrophe.

The relevance of some questions lies in their capacity to illuminate the impulse to question itself, not just as ‘cause’ but also as ‘consequence’. This does not so much involve scrutinizing the validity and efficacy of a method, in terms of its capacity to yield a correct answer, as it implies asking questions of the question. What experiences, aspirations, memories, ruses and fears prompt us to ask one question, to privilege that question over another, to answer it in a certain way, or to demand an immediate response to that particular question? Which other questions do we fail to raise when all our attention is focused on obtaining the answer to that single question?

Since March 2020, the question ‘how and when will we escape this pandemic?’ became hegemonic to the point of making us forget – or even wish to silence – other questions. This is a not insignificant part of the danger we are facing. Agamben’s question is accurate because it touches on a sore spot: the risk of blinding ourselves through mono-questioning. It is also accurate because it suggests that the way to deal clear-sightedly with what assaults us is to resist the temptation to put everything – including love, liberty and the courage to ask other questions – on hold to place our trust in the hands of the first entity, institution or discourse that promises an answer or antidote, if not to the virus, then to the fear that the uncertainty around it has generated.

At the heart of the question ‘how and when will we escape this pandemic?’ the fear of not knowing, of still not knowing, of knowing too late, shouts more loudly than the desire to be given the answer. This was a frightened question, an impatient question, a question quick to grow irritated with anyone who might want to think about other things or ask other questions. At the most basic level, it was a question unable to accept that it still did not have an answer. This is the paradox in which the global doxa became mired through its initial response to the pandemic. While it rushed to reject obscurantism and give the floor to science, it also rejected, not without dogmatism, almost with authoritarianism, the idea that science could also be uncertain.

3. Turning to science in the face of a pandemic is the right course of action. However, it is not a simple course of action: science does not speak with one voice, and it does not and cannot provide immediate certainties. It cannot produce a vaccine overnight. It is divided on the best methods for controlling the outbreak. To remember the limitations of science – of which the best scientists are perfectly sentient – is in no way to attack it. On the contrary, in the context of the generalized hysteria that followed the declaration of a pandemic by the World Health Organization on 11 March 2020, to remember the limitations of science was to protect it from the pressure exerted on it by the hunger for certainty. Philosophy can play a role in this context insofar as the questions it poses, which are not to be confused with those posed by science, reclaim for science some important room for manoeuvre.

Today this hunger for certainty is also a symptom. It reflects a defensive reaction to fake news. Fake news provides the best nourishment for negationist opinions about the seriousness of the disease and the importance of vaccination. In the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, fighting fake news is not just a matter of establishing the truth but also of saving lives. In a country like Brazil, disinformation, negationism and necropolitics go hand in hand.⁴ But the ‘true’ is not the symmetrical opposite of the ‘false’. The idolization of facts, which some people mistake for a defence of science, is fraught with epistemic and political dangers.

The point is not just that no fact constitutes in and of itself a truth, but also that it is perfectly possible to deceive people without lying. The deceptive effect of fake news goes far beyond the creation of alternative facts. Social media provide numerous examples of this apparent paradox, in which manipulation occurs through the wilful misapprehension and decontextualization of facts rather than their sheer fabrication. In this case, the obsession with factuality creates a smoke screen through which it is hardly possible to spot the difference between the true and the false. Neither science nor philosophy can operate without interpretation, and both are right to reject the misleading equation between the establishment of facts and the clarification of truth. Just as the search for truth does not amount to the enumeration of facts, when it comes to philosophy, the question that one asks, that one chooses to ask, is of the utmost importance.

4. There is a need to interrogate the present by not asking the questions the present asks. The questions employed by philosophy to interrogate its own time are not the same as the questions that this time poses or wants to see answered. They can be precisely those it does not want to hear: questions that, more than unpopular, are irritating, if not scandalous. However it is not to épater les bourgeois, or for that matter the proletarians or the aristocrats, that philosophy wields its question marks. Its purpose is not merely negative, let alone a matter of irreverence. While philosophy’s questions are almost always linked to hypotheses and suspicions, their pertinence – and in this the gap between philosophy and science is a chasm – does not stem from the attempt to expand our knowledge about the real.

According to Karl Marx’s famous adage in his ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, ‘philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it’.⁵ Theodor W. Adorno alludes to this in his Negative Dialectic, suggesting that ‘philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realise it was missed’, to which he adds that ‘the summary judgment that it had merely interpreted the world, that resignation in the face of reality had crippled it in itself, becomes a defeatism of reason after the attempt to change the world miscarried’.⁶ This philosophical knot can be untied and retied in various ways, or, as Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi suggested a few years ago, chopped off entirely: attempts to transform the world having ended in disaster, Marx’s formula should now be inverted and philosophers restricted to interpretation, namely, the task of ‘deciphering possibilities’ (which are more than just probabilities).⁷

Rather than inverting Marx’s formula, I would argue for a reassessment of the relationship between its two mottos: interpretation and transformation. Philosophy can only transform by interpreting and interpret by transforming if it doesn’t limit itself to chasing the truth about the real and the possible. The questions, hypotheses and suspicions that philosophy raises do not aim at that truth. Instead of seeking compliance with reality, they unfold as non-compliant ideas that stir up reality. In doing so, they are engaged in both interpretation and transformation.

5. To return to the debate about the pandemic, the above applies both to the hypothesis advanced by Slavoj Žižek that the pandemic represents a fatal blow to global capitalism and to the suspicion nurtured by Byung-Chul Han that increased surveillance and data control could precipitate a shift towards authoritarianism in Western countries. What sets these two perspectives apart is their tone: one is optimistic, the other pessimistic. It is their similarities, however, that I wish to focus on here (I will consider their opposition further in Chapter 2). Žižek illustrates his hypothesis using an evocative image:

The ongoing spread of the coronavirus epidemic has also triggered a vast epidemic of ideological viruses which were lying dormant in our societies: fake news, paranoiac conspiracy theories, explosions of racism. [. . .]

But maybe another and much more beneficent ideological virus will spread and hopefully infect us: the virus of thinking of an alternate society, a society beyond nation-state, a society that actualizes itself in the forms of global solidarity and cooperation. [. . .]

In the final scene of Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill: Volume 2, Beatrix disables the evil Bill and strikes him with the ‘Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique’, the deadliest blow in all of martial arts. The move consists of a combination of five strikes with one’s fingertips to five different pressure points on the target’s body – after the target walks away and has taken five steps, their heart explodes in their body and they fall to the floor. [. . .]

My modest opinion is much more radical: the coronavirus epidemic is a kind of ‘Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique’ on the global capitalist system – a signal that we cannot go on the way we have till now, that a radical change is needed.⁸

The details of the scene chosen by Žižek, from the second part of Quentin Tarantino’s cinematic diptych Kill Bill, are anything but negligible. The image of a strike to the heart of capitalism suggests a stage-by-stage breakdown rather than an immediate overthrow. Žižek is careful enough to stress that ‘what makes this attack so fascinating is the time between being hit and the moment of death: I can have a nice conversation as long as I sit calmly, but I am aware throughout it that the moment I start to walk my heart will explode’.⁹ The five steps the victim must take before they fall to the floor could be taken at any time, sooner or later. By using this metaphor, Žižek fends off the caricaturization of his hypothesis: he is not announcing the immediate demise of capitalism. The effect that his hypothesis aims for is what needs to be stressed. Interpreting the pandemic as a ‘signal that we cannot go on the way we have till now’ and that ‘a radical change is needed’¹⁰ is in itself a way of contributing to that change. The philosophical hypothesis, in short, aims not for the maximum alignment with reality, but for the maximum tension between interpretative approximation and transformative distancing.

6. The same applies to Byung-Chul Han’s reaction to the outbreak. Unlike Žižek, Han expresses a suspicion.¹¹ By highlighting the possibility that the pandemic could serve in Western countries as a pretext for the implementation of unprecedented security and control measures, of the sort which have become common in Asia, Han aims not just to realistically describe the future but also to preventatively envision what it could bring. His description has the characteristics of a warning. The object of his suspicion is that which it wishes to prevent; hence his drastic description of the situation:

The entire infrastructure for digital surveillance has now turned out to be extremely effective in containing the epidemic. [. . .]

Chinese mobile phone and Internet providers share sensitive customer data with security services and with ministries of health. The State therefore knows where I am, who I am with, what I do, what I look for, what I think about, what I eat, what I buy, where I go. It is possible that in the future the State will also control body temperature, weight, blood sugar level, etc.: a digital biopolitics that accompanies the digital psychopolitics that actively controls people. [. . .]

Here too, in regards to the pandemic, the future lies in digitalization. In view of the pandemic, perhaps we should redefine even sovereignty. The sovereign is she or he who has data.¹²

It is interesting to note the positioning along contradictory axes of the arguments of Giorgio Agamben, Slavoj Žižek and Byung-Chul Han. Žižek’s interpretation contradicts that of Agamben. How can Agamben – according to Žižek’s interpretation – call the pandemic an invention by the powers that be, when it has so clearly thrown a spanner in the works of capit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue: The pandemic is not the event
• 1 The scandal of philosophy in times of catastrophe
• 2 Questions, hypotheses, suspicions
• 3 Topology of the imagination
• 4 Apocalypse remediated
• 5 The disruption of the senses
• Epilogue: Beyond the pandemic
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint