閱讀筆記: PANDEMIC!
Perhaps an epidemic which threatens to decimate humanity should be treated as Well’s story turned around: the “Martian invaders” ruthlessly exploiting and destroying life on earth are we, humanity, ourselves; and after all devices of highly developed primates to defend themselves from us have failed, we are now threatened “by the humblest thing that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth,” stupid virus which just blindly reproduce themselves – and mutate (13).
The really difficult thing to accept is the fact that the ongoing epidemic is a result of natural contingency at its purest, that is just happened and hides no deeper meaning. In the larger order of things, we are just a species with no special importance (14).
In the last days, we hear repeatedly that each of us is personally responsible and has to follow the new rules. Media are full of stories about people who misbehaved and put themselves and others in danger, an infected man enters a store and coughs on everyone, that sort of thing. The problem with this is the same as the journalism dealing with the environmental crisis: the media over-emphasize our personal responsibility for the problem, demanding that we pay more attention to recycling and other behavioral issues. Such a focus on individual responsibility, necessary as it is to some degree, functions as ideology the moment it serves to obfuscate the bigger questions of how to change our entire economic and social system. The struggle against coronavirus can only be fought together with the struggle against ideological mystification, and as part of a general ecological struggle (88-89).
There is a key difference between the coronavirus epidemic and the ecological crisis. In the health crisis, it may be true that humans as a whole are “fighting” against – even if they have no interest in us and go their way from throat to throat killing us without meaning to it (111-112).
Materiality, usually conceived as inert substance, should be rethought as a plethora of things that from assemblages of human and nonhuman actors (actants)-humans are but one force in a potentially unbounded network of forces (113).
★ The coronavirus epidemic can be seen as an assemblage of a (potentially) pathogenic viral mechanism, industrialized, agriculture, fast global economic development, cultural habits, exploding internal communication, and so on. The epidemic is a mixture in which natural, economic, and cultural processes are inextricably bound together . . . as humans, we are one among the actants in a complex assemblage; however, it is only and precisely as subjects that we are able to adopt the “inhuman view” from which we are (partially, at least) grasp the assemblage of which we are part” 117).
