Human Extinction and the Pandemic Imaginary

Christos Lynteris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000698886
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Antropologia culturale e sociale

This book develops an examination and critique of human extinction as a result of the 'next pandemic' and turns attention towards the role of pandemic catastrophe in the renegotiation of what it means to be human. Nested in debates in anthropology, philosophy, social theory and global health, the book argues that fear of and fascination with the 'next pandemic' stem not so much from an anticipation of a biological extinction of the human species, as from an expectation of the loss of mastery over human/non-humanl relations. Christos Lynteris employs the notion of the 'pandemic imaginary' in order to understand the way in which pandemic-borne human extinction refashions our understanding of humanity and its place in the world. The book challenges us to think how cosmological, aesthetic, ontological and political aspects of pandemic catastrophe are intertwined. The chapters examine the vital entanglement of epidemiological studies, popular culture, modes of scientific visualisation, and pandemic preparedness campaigns. This volume will be relevant for scholars and advanced students of anthropology as well as global health, and for many others interested in catastrophe, the 'end of the world' and the (post)apocalyptic.

1 The end of the world as we do not know it

DOI: 10.4324/9780429322051-2

“Apocalypse warning: Ancient viruses could REAWAKEN and cause ‘global epidemic’”, reads a sheet of the British Daily Express from May 10, 2017.¹ Referring to fears that an emerging pathogen may lead to a human extinction event, the apocalyptic trope of the newspaper’s title is not a monopoly of tabloids and science fiction novels or films but is widely employed by popular science outlets as well as by epidemiologists and public health officers. Moreover, this idiomatic consensus also informs scholarly works, where technoscientific visions of human extinction (resulting from pandemics, climate change, EMP, or other drivers of existential risk) are commonly grouped together under the overarching category of the apocalyptic. As part of what we may call normative catastrophism, this trope may be suspected as being conducive to the normalization of visions of human extinction: an operation that not only reduces the latter’s distinctly late-modern character but also obscures its real consequences for humanity’s relation with the world. This is for two reasons. On the one hand, if human extinction is simply another apocalyptic variant, then the tools we need for understanding it may safely be assumed to be already in place, forged over decades or indeed centuries by theologians, historians, and, more recently, anthropologists. And, on the other hand, if this reduction holds true, no matter how scientific or secular their appearance, the net effect of visions of human extinction can be safely relegated to that of a cultural relic: a persistent but ultimately moribund Biblical heritage.²

However, this critique of human extinction as a secular apocalypse harbors a double danger: the dismissal of any and all apocalyptic or eschatological aspects of human extinction and the repudiation of any significance or impact of religious meanings and affects in the modern world.³ What then becomes necessary is to approach this question within a robust framework of what it means to be apocalyptic – a framework that goes beyond the simple, etymological formulas: “an end with revelation”, or something that “produces a new insight through destruction”, or “a process in which something concerning the end of the world gradually becomes apparent”.⁴ For if the revelatory end of the world is indeed an important aspect of the apocalyptic, it is not an adequate condition of it, insofar as it tends to obscure the diverse meanings and experiences of the world, the end, the revelation, and the relation between them across different societies and cultures.

The apocalypse, millenarianism, and eschatology have traditionally been the subject of the anthropology of religion. However, recent anthropological literature has begun to expand the examination of the apocalyptic to other spheres of social life. Following a trend well established in the humanities, where the study of the end of the world has extensively preoccupied literary and film studies, anthropologists have recently begun exploring what Roy Scranton in his entry on “apocalypse” for Cultural Anthropology’s Lexicon has broadly described as “fantasies of the end”.⁵ If climate change and the Anthropocene have been the main spheres of interest, the discussion of the apocalyptic has not been absent from anthropological accounts and critiques of “outbreak narratives”.⁶

Anthropological discussion of the apocalyptic or non-apocalyptic character of the next pandemic has largely revolved around Carlo Caduff’s notion of pandemic prophecy. A quick look at this debate is revealing of not only the prospects of but also the challenges faced by anthropological approaches of the “apocalyptic potential” of the next pandemic.⁷ Describing discourses centered on the anticipation of a catastrophic influenza pandemic, the notion of pandemic prophecy has been applied by Caduff in order to examine what makes some “scientifically inspired visions of the future […] more reasonable and authoritative than others”.⁸ Contextualizing within wider trajectories of North American apocalyptic thinking and anthropological readings of the “emerging economy of disaster capitalism”, Caduff proposes that at the heart of pandemic apocalypse lies a “cosmology of mutant strains”.⁹ This is a cosmology that pictures humanity as faced with a threat that is paradigmatically asymmetrical: nowhere and everywhere, at the same time present and absent. “Ever-changing and ever-evolving”, “unforeseeable and unpredictable”, emerging pathogens occupy a unique position of ontological and temporal exceptionality: they are yet-to-be, and yet they are already ahead of us.¹⁰ By means of investing on viral indeterminacy, this cosmology of existential risk has thus led to a “normalization and naturalization of the unknown […] as an ontological given”: a process of normative catastrophism, where “faith dwell[ing] in reason has morphed into the mythic ground for the biopolitics of pandemic preparedness”.¹¹ “Precaution”, writes Caduff,

has become a solid ground for dire prophecy and the thrill of terror, allowing experts and officials to commit a leap of faith and proceed as if the most frightening scenario was about to come true. In the political economy of disaster capitalism it is always better – ethically, politically, economically, and institutionally – to assume that the apocalypse is nigh.¹²

Responding to Caduff’s paper, James Faubion has objected to his use of the term “prophetic” and its situating within North American apocalyptic traditions. Faubion notes that Caduff identifies the apocalyptic too closely with doom, overlooking its soteriological aspects.¹³ Consequently, he casts doubt as to whether the vision of disease emergence developed by virologists corresponds to an apocalyptic vision of the end, as the temporality it reinforces is more one of institutionalized “repetition of indefinite pace, rhythm or duration, a constant recycling of catastrophe and remediation and catastrophe again”.¹⁴ This is an important critique, which rhymes with Elana Gomel’s earlier reading of pandemic discourses. In her paper “The Plague of Utopias: Pestilence and the Apocalyptic Body”, Gomel argued against an apocalyptic reading of pandemic scenarios. For whereas, she claimed, the apocalypse entails a temporality structured around an absolute end and a new, counter-temporal beginning, the next pandemic is “an accumulation of repetitive episodes, deferring any kind of meaningful closure”.¹⁵ In other words, whereas apocalyptic thinking relies on and fosters a telic (if not necessarily terminal) imaginary, the pandemic imaginary is “a cyclical plot” of meaningless endlessness. On the one hand, Gomel argued, this strips the next pandemic of any redemptive quality. And on the other hand, it abandons it in the realm of monotonous repetition, so that the end endures as a fantasy in an almost Lacanian sense of the term: as something that is constituted through its constant deferral. Indeed, this places the next pandemic within a broader cluster of end of the world variants, which, while transcending any dichotomy between immanence and imminence, retain the potency of what Frank Kermode has identified as the sense of living at a threshold: a transitory period that, to use Matilde Nardelli’s commentary on cumulative ends, “has not only been ‘elevated into an “age” or saeculum in its own right’ but moreover, indeed, into an age that ‘has become endless’”.¹⁶ Crucially, this has also been described to be the nature of climate-change-related ends of the world, which Erik Swyngedouw, following broader approaches of the so-called postmodern apocalypse (such as elaborated by Jay Martin, Richard Dellamora, Elizabeth Rosen, Klaus Scherpe, and Brent Peterson, among others), has designated as an “apocalypse forever”: a condition that in Jacques Derrida’s oft-quoted formula is “an apocalypse without apocalypse, an apocalypse without vision, without truth, without revelation”.¹⁷

Is this, however, good enough reason for us to conclude with Faubion that the next pandemic is not an apocalyptic event, or at least an event with an apocalyptic potential?¹⁸ Having defended this position myself elsewhere, I would like to reconsider, by examining briefly the two pillars of this argument.¹⁹ First, it is clear that visions of pandemic-driven human extinction do not generally dwell on redemptive aspects of a post-pandemic world (though see Chapter 5 for some such options). Rather than rendering the next pandemic non-apocalyptic, however, this would place it within the large corpus of visions of what is generally known as an apocalypse without Kingdom (or non-millenarian apocalypse). Second, what is problematic with both Faubion and Gomel’s analyses is that they overlook the fact that the “cyclical plot” that we indeed encounter in next pandemic scenarios is also entangled in the culminative plots of a wide range of unambiguously apocalyptic dramas.²⁰ What I would like to argue here, as a result, is that we should seek the next pandemic’s apocalyptic or non-apocalyptic character elsewhere: to be precise, in the relation between the time of the end and the end of time.

The time of the end and the end of time

If, in their recent book on the subject, Danowski and Viveiros de Castro’s aim has been to complicate the “end of the world”, they have done so by means of a very useful simplification – a programmatic statement of sorts:

Every thought of the end of the world thus poses the question of the beginning of the world and that of the time before the beginning, the question of katechon (the time of the end, that is, the time-before-the-end) and that of eschaton (the end of times, the ontological disappearance of time, the end of the end).²¹

As we will see in the following chapters, it is undoubtedly true that one of the key mythic operations of human extinction relates to the fact that, as an “end of the world”, it “retroprojects a beginning of the world and, by the same token, human-kind’s future fate carries us back to its inception”.²² This entails not simply a script of the world before us but indeed that much rarer vision (in Western thought at least) of us before the world, as a world the relation to which we master (a “world for man”, in Danowski and Viveiros de Castro’s typology).²³ However, this does not fully cover the area opened up by the crucial question regarding the relation between katechon and eschaton, which needs to be examined more closely, especially with regard to the temporal structure it entails.

The two terms appear in Paul’s infamously enigmatic second epistle to the Thessalonians, where the apostle (if the authenticity of the letter is to be sustained) refers to a power or person that restrains the full manifestation of anomy (katechon): a condition that will in turn be met with the Second Coming of Christ (parousia) – that is to mean, the end of time (eschaton).²⁴ Forming the basis for...