Scenes of Plotlessness (Woolf 1926; Camus 1947)

In her 1926 essay “On Being Ill,” Virginia Woolf reflects on the apparent disinterest of literature for the experience of illness and ventures that “the public would say that a novel devoted to influenza lacked plot.” Vignette 10 explains how this plotlessness achieved a certain form of prescience in an age of syndromic surveillance where epidemics exist in a suspended diagnostic state as trending searches on Google, trending topics on social media platforms, spotted spikes of over-the-counter drugs sold in a given location, and mutually self-reinforcing feedback loops in real time. Real time is a state of plotlessness. The immediacy of syndromic surveillance is essentially associative.