FLUSSER, INFLUENZA … AND EBOLA

I made a mistake that I don’t usually make when I picked up Flusser’s “writings” this week: I neglected to figure out when the piece was written. Had I been more on the ball, I would not have spent most of my time penning “Haven’t we already done this?!” comments in the margins as I read. I would have realized that, rather than being a Luddite, Flusser was instead brilliant in conceiving of a digital world that was unthinkable (at least to the masses) in 1973 when this chapter went to press. In the mid-70’s, when coin-operated photocopy machines that even university students could afford to access were the new rage, there were rumblings of basement-size ‘computers’ that were going to revolutionize the world. But we’d heard all that before; indeed, we were still lusting for George Jetson’s flying car and Jane’s spiffy kitchen—neither of which had materialized as promised. Flusser, however, as he wove his discourse on lines and surface in this essay, foresaw an entirely new dimension of thought translation, one that society has now not only achieved, but surpassed. Flusser says:

It is one of the advances of thought toward representing facts bodily, the results of which cannot yet even be suspected. It will no doubt enable us to think about facts that are presently unthinkable. Certainly, there are also other tendencies within our civilization that have not been taken into account in the foregoing schema. But we hope it will serve its present purpose: to show an aspect of our crisis, and one of the possibilities that might enable us to overcome it (Flusser 30).

Perhaps the link is tenuous, but I believe one can compare the state of the technological world in which Flusser was writing (the 1970’s), to the state of the medical world in which the 1918 Influenza flourished (flourished, that is, in a bad sort of way.) Both worlds were considered civilized, First World environments, equipped with the very best facilities and tools for implementing state-of-the-art sciences and technologies. Yet both worlds were lacking—and they realized their lack. Both could envision new, expanding worlds in which even finer facilities with even more fantastic tools could cure the incurable problems the globe was experiencing.

For Flusser, this was the digital age, which he glimpsed through his 70’s lenses, the age that would open up a “new civilization,” “a new sense of reality” (34). For Medicine, in the aftermath of the Great War, there was a similar hope of a new civilization and a new reality that would provide new ways to treat the infections that haunted surgical suites and maternity wards, new methods to prevent disease in the first place, and new mechanisms to break the complex code holding the human mind hostage in order to offer relief to those suffering the psychological trauma of mental illness.

Interestingly, a comparison of the science of medicine in Pale Horse, Pale Rider—set in the late stages of WWI—with 21^st c. medicine, finds the treatment for 1918 influenza similar to that with which the medical community today is treating Ebola. As this new virus knocks on First World doors, Medicine is looking back wistfully to the golden age of antibiotics and immunizations of the 1950’s-80’s—when all could be cured with a prescription or an injection—while rolling up its sleeves to treat a disease for which medicine can only provide supportive care.

Like their influenza counterparts almost 100 years ago, Ebola patients are provided basic care long enough for their immune system to successfully battle the viral invader, thereby saving the patient—or for their immune system to declare the fight insurmountable and surrender, thereby adding one more victim to the list that someone somewhere was/is keeping. Granted, “basic care” now includes advanced life support, including dialysis and artificial respiration, and improved pharmacologic agents (huge benefits over 1918.) Still, like influenza sufferers, Ebola patients exist in a wait-and-see limbo during their treatment. Ebola 2014 mimics Influenza 1918 in two other ways: first, efforts were/are made to prevent the disease from spreading by quarantining exposed people from the healthy; and, second, scientists from both eras put other projects on hold to devote all their resources to finding a cure—or a vaccine—for the disease.

In Pale Horse, Miranda (like her doppelganger, author Katherine Anne Porter) is saved with an experimental injection of strychnine, a drug that opened a new horizon for treating end-stage influenza patients. She describes her experience with the injection that she receives when still comatose and near death:

Pain returned, a terrible compelling pain running through her veins like heavy fire, the stench of corruption filled her nostrils, the sweetish sickening smell of rotting flesh and pus; she opened her eyes and saw pale light through a coarse white cloth over her face, knew that the smell of death was her own body, and struggled to lift her hand. The cloth was drawn away; she saw Miss Tanner [her nurse] filling a hypodermic needle in her methodical expert way, and heard Dr. Hildesheim saying, “I think that will do the trick. Try another.” Miss Tanner plucked firmly at Miranda’s arm near the shoulder, and the unbelievable current of agony ran burning through her veins again. She struggled to cry out, saying, Let me go, let me go but heard only incoherent sounds of animal suffering. She saw doctor and nurse glance at each other with the glance of initiates at a mystery, nodding in silence, their eyes alive with knowledgeable pride. They looked briefly at their handiwork and hurried away (Porter 201).

Short a vaccine for Ebola and lacking any other cure for the disease, we are in a similar boat to society in 1918—and to Flusser in 1973: we are looking over the next horizon, contemplating a new civilization that will “open up fields for a new type of thinking, with its own logic and its own kind of codified symbols” (Flusser 31), in other words, an entirely new way of addressing the limitations of our current world.

Flusser ends his essay saying: “All this is utopian. But it is not fantastic. Whoever looks at the scene can find everything already there, in the form of lines and surfaces already working. It depends very much on each one of us which sort of post-historical future there will be” (34).  At this very moment, scientists world-wide are counting on Flusser’s words that their attempt to stop a virus that is claiming at least 70% of its victims is “not fantastic;” they are working in the “forms of lines and surfaces” of their disciplines looking for the next strychnine, the next influenza-like vaccine that will save the helpless humanity suffering from this ignoble and deadly virus. We can very much hope that, in the end, a ‘post-historical’ future will indeed exist for all of us.