Gear 4; Epidemics.
It is very clear a modern epidemic is many things to many different people: If names not mere a flu outbreak although here one has the inflationary pandemic also to play with) but also the spread of computer viri or the growth in terrorism, or even the spread of information across the web? What then is it about all these very different process that allows one to call then an epidemic? Are we merely being poetic? Or is there something important, something rather sinister in the use of the term? It this essay seven principles for modern epidemics are developed, principles that unite all epidemics, and hope to show why it names modern fear, much as the devil or communisms or witches serves as the name for past fear.
First and foremost an epidemic names a secret growth The plague in whatever form is always growing always expanding, and yet doing so in a way one cannot quite grasp. As such it is a focus for endless paranoia and complexities. On knows that something somewhere else something is wrong. All the fears, or worries or stresses of threats of both day to day life or even existence itself can then be caught up by this worry. They could very easily be expressed though it, is an and coordinated into a wider anxiety. That is, a fear about losing ones job, and not being able to speak or immediately address ones relatives, is swept up beyond racism into a fear of a insidious threat, namely terrorisms. Or again the worry the police have that they might loose control of a potentially violent (but actually peaceful) demonstration, is expressed within the desire to limit and control all difference all possibility. Or to put is differently it creates in the minds of the police he belief in the ‘demonstrator’ as a kind of viri who is able to suddenly hatch out and take control, suddenly erupt into disaster.. The only response in the face of such a goblin is to lock everything down, and everyone up. The police then impose a massive lock down on a community or an area, and hope thereby to quarantine their fear.
The epidemic names that silent fear we have then that suddenly everything will be wrong, everything will not be as we thought it, everything will be other. This fear is perhaps endemic in Industrial societies. After all it appears to be the distinguishing feature of all such societies that somewhere there is indeed something which will silently revolutionised the world. Somewhere the beyond me there will be a machine or a disease or a revolution to change everything. This ‘something’ reflects not only the fact that such societies are pock marked by major industrial changes (think here of the effect of he micro chip thirty years ago or the effect of the intern net now). Also (and just as importantly) have a very strained relationship with their own connectivity. We know we are connected to others and therefore we cannot stop those others brain into our live and yet we are connected at a level at which we cannot easily grapes the ‘other’, we can never knew that they are doing or exactly how that connectivity will manifest. ‘Others’ become then akin of monster stalking the margins of our lives. Individuals beyond our ken who might be doing or thinking or hacking or developing anything for all we know: All be can be sure of is whatever it is it will break suddenly and completely upon us, and demand that we change hat we are is response. Epidemic there names a partially collectivist- a collectivist of sharing in an effect without know (exactly0 how that effect was caused.
This then leads to its second main feature. It is in the essence of all epidemics that they exist at many different levels. An Epidemic is then as much about the rumour , the cloud of faces and semi reporting t sis about any disease. Take the current Swine flu pandemic. On the one and there is story here; he fasted changing thing on the planet mutates again (and this time into something a little new). Ad yet the scientific fact s into really what the story was about. The story was more the fact that the media thought hey were going to be in on the ‘kill’, that is in at the start of an outbreak o end all outbreaks, the 1919 flu returned gain, to put us all (or many of us) in our graves. They were looking then for something biblical and what they got was merely something technical. That is the evolution a new and not particularly deadly flu. However once the story had even run with and the investments made in both reporter and face masks, the story really could not be allowed to die. It therefore rather rumbled on, new potentially fears or risks were identified, and new ‘angles’ found/ Swine flue then became as much a name for a fear to come a potential killer, as it did anything real. Hat is the rumour the scary ‘facts’ took over (partially) form the real ones and become the only possible story.
The epidemic then in spreading by rumour in making rumour the story offers a real odd power to the media. On h one hand the idea a of than epidemic which has it organs somewhere and which will silently spreads, offer reporter (and scientists) a point to see a future erupting. One is in at the movement the world, changed (or at least might be). The epidemic then provides the perfect modern news story: That is the one that reports the future, reports what might be, and does not relate the present at ; the epidemic makes then the future new worthy (and futures make the easiest of stories). And yet it does so in such a way that if that future fails to materialize then one still has the effect of running the story about that future. That is the story becomes the story. He media are then in a double win bet: no wonder then they often functions the high priests of the epidemic.
The epidemic the names a future possible. In doing so is will always necessarily disrupt the present and made it somehow false or odd. It demands then that whatever I am doing now might just might catch me up in something bigger or different or deadly. I might then be caught up in having flu or being blown apart. Thee normal becomes the tricky. It becomes something to be worry at. One looks then at teachers (or uncles) for signs of paedophilia or one worries for insipid madness in ones own actions we all have a psychological condition these days you know). The normal becomes the something utterly problematic and wit it we risk loosing our lives to paranoid. The trouble of course there is that the modern world in indeed rather odd and fairly scary. The minute the that the normal is questioned there is not really anything to stop that question or the worries that low of it. Epidemics or the fear that something is wrong somewhere can rip through over or across a population. We feel, we know that for all we know there is something wrong. We experience then in the epidemic the names fear that enders reality empty and full or despair.
But here one needs to be careful the positive version of this fear is just as problematic. That is that sudden rush of hope that something from somewhere, so lottery win or other, some victory in some daffy show some pyramid or ponzi scheme will make us rich, is just as dangerous. Hopes can rip a population apart as lives and normality are staked on smoke mirrors and lies. Hope is then in a sense one of the worst of epidemics. At the milder end of the contagion I makes individuals unhappy and unable to settle in their lives. There might be something around the corner, something better, some place ’ they have heard of’ (once in a lullaby), where things are different. Normality becomes then something to despise. But more at the more extreme ends it ransoms life’s to blind hope in other be they DSS claims or lottery wins. M success my moving beyond whatever backwater I have found myself to be within then becomes the province for something or someone else to do : modern politics a well as salesmanship) works in camping up this hope. Beyond this devaluing a life there is the saddest extreme of the malady in which individuals risk everything al their normality against a future dream, and risk loosing it in a pyramid sale or a ponzi scheme.
Just as importantly an epidemic has no stable form. Flu is then characterized by the ability to jump species or mutate and become more deadly. Or again a media story starts as about one thing and then grows in the telling or the distorting, it becomes about something quite different, and often far more nebulous. Stories or rumours evolve and change. To fight then is therefore always to be fighting the previous version. To fight then is always to be up against the breaking in of the future, That is the movement that whatever efforts one has made, whatever one has done is always on the line, always subject to the pains and tribulation of the next big event, There the problem is not merely that one will not have an effective set of tools for the new outbreak, but also that one will be caught up in ones struggles in being the past, in being part do what was, the old disease the old treatment, and they by fail to become part in the new. The epidemic, and the mutations it endlessly undergoes then spates the wheat from the chaff, the new from he old. The problem the that prime misters such as Gordon Brown face is that he appears, unable to articulate modern worries and enable o despond to the current tumble of events. He has then becoming a living haunting history an man for whom the only proper response is ‘oh is he still prime Minster?’. The trouble of course that we face (in Britain) is that Cameron is no poet of the future he is merely not as incompetent as Brown (and that is merely because he is younger I suspect and so has not himself got a ‘history’ to loose himself within). The conservatives will then win the next general election, but without any ideas or hopes or even abilities. They will win merely because Brown is the walking embodiment of a past world (and appears unable to realize this fact).
Epidemics and the spread of rumour usher in futures and creates pasts, and yet got so in a weird way, they do so geographically. That is it is possible to watch the future break upon the world, and map how it spreads and how it changes. The future, becomes then at once ‘our future’ (that is the worry about what is always sweeping us up) whole being locked in this own futuring (that is changing what it is and how it spreads) and does so in a way that can be genuinely mapped out. One has points of places the future is award and other points that it is only a rumour and a fear. Te epidemic then means a world where fault lines of what is already changing the world what is sweeping towards or away from us can bad will be mapped out and traced. A which point of course we clutch madly at the idea of the global. Global body are the organization that are meant to contain such a future, That is they are charged with containing it or at least attempting to arbitrate between those places already in an epidemics grip and those merely swept along by rumour. The fact that such bodies are frequently powerless and can do little is then actually often not those bodies fault. They are powerless because this appear by s to globalization is more an expression o hope than an epidemic could be contained then anything actually possible. It is in the nature of epidemics that they challenge and that the change the world. Global organization are then up against something elemental as well as global) and no wonder they are powerless in the face of it.
This last fact then leads on to the problem the state has in the face of epidemics. That is the problem it has in the face of a breaking future. Traditionally, it has only two responses to such a future. Firstly it can vaccinate a population. Vaccination is curious phenomena The theory so very easy, a little bit of poison will help. And yet then problem is that the vaccination demands two things of the population,. One the one hand that they behave en mass, and take mass risk. If the (as with) individuals want to bunch the trend and resist the pressure, if they want to gamble on their own short term interest, then the system breaks down. Measles is therefore back (and killing). Vaccination therefore demands that a pollution has the accept that they are merely a number and take the risk of a number. That is they are merely a figure whose own individual fate matters less that the numerical herd. The death of this or that child is then at against or set against the fate of the death of verity many children. To vaccinate is therefore to demand the utilitarian population. On the other hand vaccination textures a pollution it creates goes to treat groups not to treat. I makes then exactly who get what, who is allowed the disease and who is saved political. It changes therefore the impersonal disease into the stuff of human politics with all that involves. Vaccination therefore demands a population forgets its own individuals interests while at the same tie becoming political. A move that in today rather personal politics appears rather problematic and difficult.
The only other strategy a state can have in the face of an epidemic is to fight fire with fire. That is epidemic with rumour and fear. To fight an epidemic, is the for the state to pose as the great protector and yet o do so it needs both to worry the population and then to use that worry to control. The epidemic (be it flu or terrorists) then becomes the excuse to increase authoritarianism both by fear (and its rumor) and control. To govern a state then becomes in a sense a matter of ensuring that the 'right' kind of epidemics are present in the population. One wants some so that ones power is justified (and effortlessly extended0 but one does not of course want others (those that would undermine the state itself): Hence perhaps the old George W Bush formula, Yes to terrorism (with its dreams of control) but No to global warming (with this treat to the economy).
