Hauntavirus!

[ecosophia]

I imagine that by this time all my readers have heard the yelling about a hantavirus outbreak on the cruise ship MV Hondius. It's all very familiar stuff for those who remember a certain other virus outbreak not that many years ago: scare stories in the media, a first wave of reassurances from officials that it won't be a serious public health issue, and so on. While we wait to see just how precisely this scare tracks the Covid fiasco of 2019-2023, I'd like to raise a point relevant to some of the ongoing discussions here and on my blog. 

It's become increasingly clear that every virus capable of causing human deaths has, or can have, a twofold existence: one as a biological entity, the other as a media spectacle. These two needn't have much to do with each other at all. With this in mind, I'd like to borrow and repurpose a turn of phrase from Jacques Derrida, and propose that viruses that play a certain closely related set of roles in media spectacles might best be termed hauntaviruses. 

Derrida used the term "hauntology" as a slurring together as "haunt" and "ontology," to point to phenomena such as Marxism which haunt the collective imagination with visions of a world that does not and will not exist -- in Derrida's phrasing, "an always-already absent present." In exactly the same way, a hauntavirus is a virus loaded up with imagery of mass death borrowed at one and the same time from cultural memories of the past (e.g., the Black Death and the Spanish Flu) and media-generated images of catastrophic dieoff in the future. Those spectral images, not the prosaic details of disease biology and epidemiology, then guide the collective reaction to the virus. 

Of course that reaction can be, and has been, exploited by various groups for political and financial gain, Of course that reaction can also be fostered by various groups for the same reason. There's a mordant irony in the fact that Naomi Klein's book The Shock Doctrine is among the best analyses of this process, given that Klein herself became a cheerleader for the medical and pharmaceutical interests that profited most egregiously from the Covid fiasco, following the very scheme she'd anatomized so precisely. (I wondered more than once if she'd ever read her own book.) Yet the reaction isn't just a product of exploitation -- and indeed the fact of crass exploitation of a medical crisis, as we saw during the Covid years, has itself become another specter hovering over a viral outbreak. 

Exactly how the current hauntavirus will play out over the next few years will be interesting to watch. It might follow the arc of Covid, in which case may the gods help us all. It might follow the arc of monkeypox, which was well on its way to becoming a hauntavirus when politically embarrassing facts got out -- first, that the outbreak in question seems to have been entirely a matter of sexual transmission among gay men, and then, once this became clear, that the virus turned up in very awkward places. such as the pet dog of one infected gay couple. (To be fair, it's worth noting that some straight people do gross things too.) We'll just have to see -- but it seems to me that the Situationist perspectives discussed over on my main blog might offer some useful tools for tracking the rise of a new hauntavirus and the ways in which competing groups try to exploit it for their own gain. 

Edit 5/10/26: Chile's Ministry of Health has an excellent website with information on the hantavirus strain involved in this outbreak, which Chilean physicians deal with routinely.  It's in Spanish, but translates clearly. Give it a read, and copy the information so we can see if the website gets changed later on...