My last blog entry mentioning face-masks
The face-mask makes what is already de-humanized behaviour a step more explicit.
What we are going through now may be a temporary expedient, or it may be the new shape of daily life. We shouldn’t be too surprised if it proves to be the latter, because we have already accepted as ‘normal’ much of what we, and the official commentators on the pandemic, are pretending are anomalies: De-humanization.
Responses to the Covid-19 threat require the temporary loss of many of the things which still make life bearable, makes it human – physical contact, the arts and entertainment, social mobility. But the responses to the virus are, in this sense, caricatures of what is already happening, and like all caricatures, they help us see salient aspects of our society that we overlook or ignore. The pandemic has caused a gestalt shift, and what was the unnoticed background has become the focal ‘figure.’
The face-mask is an especially explicit signifier of dehumanization, making manifest what has been latent (I promise this is my last post to mention face-masks!). A mask de-personalizes, and robs us of a basic locus of expressiveness - the mouth - in such an obvious fashion. So perhaps now we will recognize that it is only the new tip of the iceberg of de-humanization.
A supermarket or shopping mall is already a horribly de-humanizing place, but now that everyone is by law obliged to wear masks (in Korea, anyway, but I guarantee, also very soon in a supermarket or shopping-mall near you) it becomes much more obvious. Or at least for as long as the face-mask is novel. But soon, it will have become as unremarkable as all the other de-humanizing aspects of modern shopping which we now accept as just part-and-parcel of ‘normal’, ‘convenient’ daily life.
Another example. The way in which the pandemic has forced more and more social interactions on-line. This form of communication was already de-humanized, in that it largely subtracts the body from social interaction. But now that a meeting between friends, a meeting of work colleagues, or a school or university class, must take place via Zoom or some such platform we can more readily recognize the blatant way in which the digital media impoverish human communication.
What I have said assumes, of course, that there is a prior concept of what it means to be healthily ‘human.’ Where does this concept come from? Some would say it is an ideological construct. But I am increasingly convinced that this is nonsense. We all instinctively know what it means to be ‘human’. The problem is we live in a society that, for reasons much too complicated to consider here, seems hell-bent on an agenda of de-humanization.
But I don’t think we can cast this process in terms of conflict theory - of the oppressor and oppressed. Bizarre as it may seem, everyone get de-humanized in their own way. Perhaps the best way to describe the dynamics of de-humanization is to say that they are semi-autonomous. De-humanization has taken on a life of its own independent of any particular human agent. Maybe it’s a dehumanization ‘memeplex’, to use the terms of Richard Dawkins. If so, then Covid-19 is now part of its survival strategy.