Divagation: Disruption
The ‘germ theory’ of disease in the mass media, as it becomes, at once, more and more crude and more and more magical, is one effect of this thoroughgoing fragmentation of humanity-world. Ironically, pseudo-dissident defenders of this backward, mechanistic biology (e.g. Robin Monotti, Giorgio Agamben) also tend to be advocates of a mystifying, flabby pseudo-holism, wherein distinction itself is dismissed as Mara and the ruse of Satan.
This successful fragmentation, which we should picture as the obstruction (and pathologizing) of synthesizing capacities —the logging on to a prosthetic mind equipped with a paradigm of reality modelled on the ‘dial’ as it was once called, of television channels — allows for the highly uncivil insistence on obedience to the worldview and biological models favored by the pharmaceutical industry to be carried out by ideologues who in general discredit the very intellectual tools they ostentatiously and hamhandedly deploy in defence of the ruling class messages. Carrying out their brief to defend the plague show, they’re prancing around before their power points of comically manipulated garbage data and cartoon imagery of imagined virii, and then reverting to their normally scheduled programming vending a mildewed anti-intellectualism from the early 20th century, those fascist pseudo-critiques of analytic anything-whatever, that is, Heideggerian woo-woo honte-ology1.
I actually never saw an episode of X-files but yes, you’re ahead of me: surely the fact that most of these culture warriors of the ruling class and its lieutenants imbibed that hit show in their impressionable youth goes some way toward an explanation of the form of their infantilism, as they perform as alternately Mulder (connecting the dots) and Scully (surgeon). And lately they’re vending this duo, preposterously, as co-tenants of your skull, in the form of Left and Right Hemispheres.
Ironically, soap opera is wiser than that ideology the ruling class charges it up with when it sends it into your soulbody, to be processed through the endlessly spectacle-izing moronism of the evopsychos like McGilchrist, so that the dominant pleasure (the kernal of truth) of the entertainment commodity (the social relation, indeed love story, between mimetic characters - not halves of brains in vats - Mulder and Scully) is discarded as merely a concrete husk disguising and protecting the magical simplicity, unveiled in the endlessly repeated slogans The Left is the Enemy, The Left is The Arm of Capital (Cory Morningstar) and The Left Brain Is The Enemy, The Left Brain Is Capital and Death (Ian McGilchrist).
In the days when X-files was this huge worldwide hit, nobody thought to view it as excitingly reversing a gender binary by portraying Mulder as the Intuitive Holistic Mind and Scully as the Skeptical Detailed Analytic Experimenter. A lot of ground has been recovered by the ruling class’ revanchist culture war with their many fronts and flags (both the pronoun-cers and the anti-pronoun-cers are vending humanity as a stuff that comes in pink or blue).
But these signals can all be juggled now. Endless scissor rock paper rounds. The bad White Science, the authoritative White Science, the toxic masculinity, the virile virology, the wicked mass, the wicked consumer-individual, the funder crowd, etc etc..
Derrida played with ontology as hauntology, hantologie, the knowledge of the spectral, of ghostly traces, and I want to add here honte, shame, shameology, to stress the spread of the malady of Nazi somatophobia and life-loathing which Klaus Theweleit has recorded and examined so thoroughly in Male Fantasies.