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Who is more at risk: the person liable to get COVID or the person unable to work? Who poses more risk: the person liable to spread COVID or the person unwilling to work? Here you have it: roughly two months into the spectacle of Coronavirus as represented on FOX News and MSNBC, these are the strange bedfellows of the Corona primal scene.
In not-so olden days, we’d have an Oedipal couple to ignite fantasy while absorbing primal projections. Now we have a cesspool of data and Sean Hannity and Rachel Maddow streaming alongside one another but never coupled. To pace the risk of being among Others involves sorting among COVID objects whose statistical provenance depends on which network you watch. We learn not to separate notions of “the object” from engagement with political structures and media as technology and psyche intertwine.
“Population racism” (Clough, 2018) fuses data analytics to racial tropes yielding the bearers of financial risk airtime among the dead. “Vulnerability” proliferates in datafied subjectivity as internal objects glom onto politicized metrics of risk. Our lives and psyches, our relationships and our identities have been psycho-metricized for years, yet psychoanalysts often fail to consider data’s unconscious heft. Now we, like our patients, are bound up in collective primal scenes—virtual moments of unconscious object frenzy that make measure of death counts and financial projections that mediate a life’s worth. Fantasy runs amok when there is no Patient Zero to ground fear in place and time.
That’s grim – but I’m optimistic, and mindful of a previous epidemic. Let’s not forget that HIV terrorized us for several years before there was a reliable test of seropositivity. Between 1981 and the late 1980s having sex was a crapshoot. Evidence that HIV is neutralized in saliva was not conclusive until the late 1990s; the morning-after “rapid assay” HIV-test not until 2016. Was it safe to kiss? People abstained, created closed-loops of safe-sexual partners