New World Same Humans #7
Representation, reality, and Covid-19
Welcome to New World Same Humans, a weekly newsletter by TrendWatching’s Global Head of Trends and Insights, David Mattin.
This week I did what you also did: obsessively hit refresh as I watched the evolving picture on Covid-19.
There are numerous great sources on the extent of the outbreak, and the forecasted health and economic impacts. Instead it was the looking itself, and the relationship between looking and knowing, that inspired what follows.
What part of the movie is this?
In 1722 the great English pamphleteer and proto-novelist Daniel Defoe published A Journal of the Plague Year. It’s a scrappy, journalistic first-person account of the Great Plague of London, complete with a running tally of the dead and incredulous descriptions of a capital city juddering into shutdown.
Plague Year is often held up as a valuable historical source on the last epidemic of bubonic plague to occur in England. But the book’s veracity is really a trick of the light. Although it was written in 1722 and reads like the eyewitness account of a London merchant, the events it describes occurred over half a century earlier, in 1665. Defoe was only five-years-old when the epidemic hit. When he came to write the book he combined his distant childhood memories with extensive documentary research to create a narrative that had feel of urgent, dangerous lived experience.
Because it dispensed with visible artifice, focused on everyday detail and situated itself among the ordinary people of London, Plague Year influenced the emergence of a new narrative genre: the novel. In particular, it became the archetype for an entire sub-genre of its own: the epidemic narrative. You hear its echoes in other great examples of that genre, such as The Plague by Albert Camus, or Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood.
So we feel the ripples of Plague Year even today, in the (mostly cinematic) stories of pandemic millions are turning towards to help them understand what is happening now. As the picture on Covid-19 becomes more clear, it’s apparent that we’re at the start of something considerable. We’ve already seen an unprecedented quarantine of 11 million people in Wuhan. Now Italy has quarantined 16 million in its northern provinces. Containment has failed; it looks likely we’ll see millions of cases worldwide, and in a credible worst case scenario there will be millions of deaths.
In their attempts to process all this you can see people reaching repeatedly for the same refrain. That refrain is ‘this is like a movie.’ Some of them mean, ‘this is like Contagion’, the 2011 pandemic movie that’s seen a spike in iTune rentals and torrent downloads in recent days.
‘This is like a movie’ or its earlier incarnation ‘this is like a novel’ is a feeling that engulfs people during many kinds of experience, especially heightened experience. People say it when they first set foot in Venice: ‘this is like a movie set!’ They might say it when they fall in love, or witness a terrible accident.
It seems an innocuous thing to say. But really it describes a strange inversion. One that tells us something intriguing about the mysterious relationship between reality and our representations of the world.
When people write a novel, create a film, or even simply speak a sentence, they are engaged in a project of representation. They are building a model of the world. Here is reality; here is my model of reality, which is meant to show us what reality itself is like.
But time and again we humans find ourselves falling through the semantic looking glass, and landing in a situation in which the relationship between representation and reality is inverted. Instead of using reality as a baseline against which we judge the veracity of our representations, we come to use our representations as a baseline against which we judge reality. Instead of saying, ‘this model is just like the real thing!’ we say ‘this reality is just like the model!’
Our representations become more real to us than the reality they are meant to describe. It seems to me that this paradox captures something essential, and hard to grasp in its entirety, about the way humans inhabit the world. It was the insight that fuelled the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard when he wrote about hyperreality back in the 1990s. Perhaps it is the submerged truth hiding in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.
I think the seeds of this inversion lie even in our simplest forms of representation – in the nature of language itself. Even to say something such as ‘there is a table’ relies on a mental representation of an ideal table that becomes, in some sense, more real to us than the observed object. But as our systems of representation become increasingly sophisticated, the ways in which they overthrow reality become more powerful. In 2020 we inhabit a totalizing system of representations – novels, films, your Twitter feed, your Instagram endless scroll, the New York Times, Fox News – so overwhelming that it’s impossible to say where reality starts and representation begins.
(Side thought: you could think about human history as a process of the development of increasingly sophisticated systems of representation. From the earliest cave scratchings, to language, to media, to the immersive representations that lie ahead of us, which will become entire worlds in themselves. All this relates to the emergence of augmented modernity, which I wrote about in NWSH #4)
As Covid-19 continues to unfold, and events stack upon events, people will continue to ask what part of the pandemic movie we’ve reached now.
Our systems of representation will of course bring us news of this viral outbreak. News that is needed, useful, and that can shape our response. But those representations – along with others from our past that we reach for – will also estrange us from that reality in ways we find hard to understand. Look closely and its apparent that the relationship between representation and reality is always unstable, so that the stories we tell ourselves constantly vie to become more real to us than the world we seek to understand via those stories.
It’s a truth that Defoe made use of when he wrote A Journal of the Plague Year. And it’s one that will become tangible in the months ahead, as billions around the world turn to novels, films, social media and more in their attempts to make sense of yet another new world. They will bring a set of shared representations, or world-models, to Covid-19 – ‘okay, we’re getting to this part of the movie’ – that structures their subjective experience of what unfolds, but that also estranges them from this event even as it informs them of it. The reality, though, will continue to assert itself. And it may not be like any of the movies we’ve seen.
Be well
I return, now, to the most dependable reminder of the real in the weeks ahead: relentless hand washing.
Be well this week,
David.
P.S: here is a representation of my feeling that Nikki Ritmeijer deserves real kudos for the illustrations in this email.