Make me less, so, I want more (more).

– 'XS' (2020), Rina Sawayama.

Increasingly the management of the pandemic demonstrates the tendency to accept conditions, divorced from their horror, as comforting. That the wearing of face masks in public makes one feel safer shows how reason itself becomes irrational. As if a world where face coverings are ubiquitous should invoke anything other than the most powerful alarm at the state of the system. To be clear, this certainly is not an essay complaining about the wearing of masks, something that helps ensure the safety of ourselves and others, rather it is one that addresses the mask as a symptom of our cartoonishly apocalyptic historical position. How swiftly the government encouraged people to congregate and enjoy their freedom to consume, before reversing all of this messaging and blaming us for doing what they told us was our patriotic duty, bodes darkly for the future responses to such upheavals. That we all (those of us who even accept the virus is real) knew there would be a second peak, something that has been accepted as a fact even during the first peak, means nothing in the face of this duty. Warnings against the progressing state of things are drowned out by the ceaseless bellowing of advertising to return to ‘normality’. Injunctions to consume and enjoy what remains the same, and always will, entices us to rejoin an atomised society that can offer nothing except consumption.

On an everyday level, it is quite easy to blame the general public, the potential vectors of the virus that transmit it to those around them, for the resurgence of cases. This as I see it is a quite elementary example of capitalist ideology showing itself here. Understood as the dominant norms,  rules, and social ‘givens’ we are all suffused with, ideology in the 21st century individualises everything, and transforms all interactions into transactional processes. It is important to understand that ideology is not a ‘lie’, rather it is the very way that we experience our social reality, which is to say it offers solutions to real problems, but neglects certain facts to ensure its stability. That said, where is the hint of truth in the idea that the general public are to blame? It is true that if people adhered rigidly to physically distancing themselves from others, wore masks, limited time spent in public places, the death toll would undoubtedly be lower. Such a view is, however, painfully naïve, and ignores the very real responsibility of the government to provide followable guidance that not only works, but makes sense, a responsibility they seem to have wilfully shirked. The messages from the government about the pandemic have been consistently vague, erratically timed, and insufficient in their substance. While officially focused on safety, the actions of the powerful during this time tells a different story, one that produces the effect of overwhelming people with the intricacies of confusing guidance. One could speculate that this has been the real goal all along, not just normalising the deaths and irrationality, but to make people so tired of trying to understand the rules that they give up on the official narrative of ensuring safety and return to previous consumer habits. Rising numbers of cases combined with ineffective curfew legislation and the ‘rule of six’, demonstrate once again Marx’s dictum of how historical events often happen twice – “The first time as tragedy, the second time as farce”. We appear to be on a trajectory to experience exactly the same disaster as we did months ago, only this time the public will be more aggressively blamed.

As with all breakdowns in social reality, the lockdown has reinvigorated conspiracy thinking, with the 29 August protest in Trafalgar Square being a worrying instance. Faced with the deepening irrationality of the world, such people incorporate its full absurdity and reflect the death of reason back into life. They recognise and feel the material effects of the crisis unfolding everywhere, yet refuse to reckon with the terror of the global machine spurring everything towards annihilation impersonally – it is far more pleasant to believe that the virus is a planned hoax by the ruling class than it is to recognise how underprepared the world is for such events occurring. German intellectual Theodor Adorno, in his recently republished book Minima Moralia (2020), saw long ago how this phenomenon operates:

“Those socialised into desperate isolation hunger for community and flock together in cold mobs. So folly becomes an epidemic: insane sects grow with the same rhythm as big business. It is the rhythm of total destruction. The fulfillment of persecution-fantasies springs from their affinity to bloody realities.”

 Knowing that they are continually wronged, they take hold of the lies they are told by their rulers, and bend them into shape to fit what they already believe. So their unconscious wishes to have the awful truth concealed from them, and to feel like a persecuted hero, are married. This is why conspiracy thinking is so effective – it places the individual at the centre of a plan, within a convincing story that offers succour to the individual that increasingly disappears as the chaos envelops everything. The irrationality of refusing to wear a mask obscures the more profound irrationality of a world where such a thing is necessary, and all the more completely do anti-maskers erase their individuality even as they scream out in protest for its return. Such are the inevitabilities of a system based on continually accelerating the production and consumption of commodities, one that requires its subjects to spend all their time outside of work getting ready to return to it, making themselves feel better the only way that most are given – by consuming. Pop artist Rina Sawayama's recent song 'XS' (2020) very explicitly gives voice to this desire:  

“Gimme just a little bit more, little bit of excess

Oh, me, oh, my

I don't wanna hear "No, no"

Only want a "Yes, yes"

Oh, me, oh, my” 

Given how closely it corresponds to the seductive pop of Britney Spears or Destiny's Child, 'XS' sounds like it could have quite easily originated from the mid-90s or the 2000s. Yet Sawayama does something interesting with XS, in that the mangled, bug-eyed anxiety inherent to 21st century consumerism is given sonic form through a distorted guitar riff that punctuates the transition to and from the chorus. What should be noted here is how the distorted guitar riff does not upset the formula of the song so much as it is the necessary supplement to it, concealed by the otherwise sparkling sheen of the melody. What can be interpreted here is an effective critique of capitalism, one that shows the underbelly of commodity production and the consumer experience as a total process. The climax at the end of the cut, rather than reproducing the familiar jubilance of 2000s R&B pop, is instead rendered as an unsettling carnival of differently-textured audio elements, mimicking the familiar cacophony of advertising in over-stimulatory shopping centres. What is this “excess” after which Sawayama pines? It is, in a sense, the consumption of consumerism itself. Not only does this “little bit more” refer to wanting more commodities, it also refers to wanting more of the experience of wanting more commodities. This is what our ‘freedom’ currently consists of –  immersing oneself in the ecstatic storm of alienated consumption. But real freedom, such as the freedom to enjoy without the injustice of commodity production weighing on us, is something quite different, and something that we will have to reckon with sooner or later. 

Just after the height of the lockdown, I remember a great sense of apprehension about the outside world. What would it look like? What would the new measures imposed be and how would they work? Well, we now know what they are, and the banality of them should be worrying. A key function of ideology is the fear of radical change, a human impulse that is capitalised on and exacerbated. Given the world we live in, where all the evidence points in the direction of pandemics becoming more common, ecological catastrophe being more and more certain, the true horror (that we are now witnessing) is that nothing really changes. There is every indication that the projects of neoliberalism will not be reversed by what has happened in the recent months, that production as a whole will not be reorganised, that the manufactured cruelty of a society where there is more than enough food and housing for everyone, yet people still go without, will remain unchanged. The system that presides over the worst health crisis in a century allocates excess resources to the proliferation of how many different styles of mask one can buy. Human connection has been reestablished by the vastly expanded use of data-harvesting conference call programs, designed for use by companies, not friends seeking warmth. It is also clear that, for the moment, online shopping is not enough to satisfy consumer desire by itself. Physical spaces outside of those we were confined to for months offer a welcome relief from isolation, but as with everything else today, they come with the ideological baggage of consumerism. So much do people need their consumption rituals that, like one lost in a desert, they scramble toward and drink violently from the oasis, willingly unaware of the vultures that inevitably always get the last laugh. 

Tom Beed is a writer, actor and founding member of Chasing Cow Productions. He has a degree in International Relations and Politics from Oxford Brookes University.