The Global Pandemic Did Not Take Place: Cancellation, Denial, and the Normal New

• In Event: Bio-Informational Philosophy and Postdigital Knowledge Ecologies

Abstract

Perhaps because it exists at an intersection between knowledge and biology, the global pandemic forces us either to address, or ignore, its existential and epistemological threats. This paper draws on various theories, philosophies and other forms of writing, applied to education and politics, to examine the extent to which the pandemic offers an opportunity to rethink and redo. As we emphasise, the pandemic is made up of both the virus and our responses to it. In fact, the promise of a return to ‘normal’ manifests as both a forlorn hope and a considerable threat: being lost is ever more attractive than being found.
The paper’s title draws on Baudrillard’s (1981, 1991) notions of simulacra and simulation in relation to the Gulf War: ‘The idea of a clean war, like that of a clean bomb or an intelligent missile, this whole war conceived as a technological extrapolation of the brain is a sure sign of madness.’ (Baudrillard 1991: 55) In the understandable concern with achieving a ‘new normal’ since the initial lockdowns were introduced, the emphasis has been much more firmly on the normal (the pandemic did not take place) than the new (we have all been irretrievably altered). Here we explore the normalness of the new, building on Baudrillard’s (1981, 1990) notion of irreversibility and insight that ‘the territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it’.
Informed also by Frederic Jameson’s (1984) concern that a sense of historicity has been unsettled by the ‘discontinuous flow of perpetual presents’, we read Baudrillard’s analysis as a call to arms for the return to an effective historical sense to restore complexity, disorder and contention in a world that potentially wants none of it. This is congruent with Lefebvre’s (2002: 226) notion of a critique of everyday life, which aims to ‘render ambiguities bearable, and to metamorphose what seems to be most unchangeable in mankind’.
Our exploration of its implications is applied primarily to education because it is a key area in and through which the pandemic’s effects can be examined and mediated. To do this, our analysis explores issues of cancellation, denial, depersonalization, vulnerability and remembering/ forgetting. We conclude by asserting that so much of our understanding of the pandemic is out of its depth that we need to use theoretical insights like those we have drawn on to examine and resist the myths and pretences that have been used to disguise that failure of understanding and to create new knowledge ecologies and forms of education.

References
Baudrillard, J. (1981). Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
Baudrillard, J. (1991). The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Jameson, F. (1984). Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism. New Left Review, 146, 53-92.
Lefebvre, H. (2002). Critique of Everyday Life Vol 2: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday. London: Verso.

Authors

• Peter Bennett, University of Wolverhampton

• Michael Jopling, University of Brighton