COVID-19: PANDEMIC OF DISTRUST, VACCINATION BY KNOWLEDGE, VIRUS OF PROTEST
Building on theory and research on rumour dynamics, I examine how the search for and acquisition of information during a time of medical crisis relies on the politics of plausibility and the politics of credibility. In this, I examine how the content and source of information affects the spread of uncertain knowledge during periods of disaster by taking into account the social dynamics of ignorance, a decisive element for fields of knowledge where the public has little ability to judge. The assertion of multiple truth claims about the current pandemic leads to challenges to previously taken-for-granted realities, but also provides potential solutions. Conditions that require an immediate response may differ from those that evolve over a longer period (fast and slow rumours). Making use of rumours about the COVID19 pandemic, I address how epistemic disruption undercuts established norms (disruption-of) but also creates the possibility of desirable change through new negotiations, strengthening community (disruption-for).
Pandemic disease is not merely a biological reality but also a cognitive and socially constructed phenomenon which intensely mobilizes a multiplicity of political frames. Farright political entrepreneurs are, despite their remoteness from actual decisionmaking processes, active stakeholders in the current cri sis. Existential threats to societies breed a sense of urgency and heightened cultural warfare that is a hotbed for extremism. Our study seeks to map, com pare and contrast the symbolic responses to the Coronavirus crisis articulated by various farright actors in two established democracies in the transatlantic area: the United States and France. We aim to shed light on how entrenched farright mythologies and tropes—which appear increasingly transatlantic—are channeled into a new synthesis as part of an “alternative” political epistemolo gy. Infused with the mythos of resistance and insurgency, resolutely antisys temic, this alternative epistemology can better be described, following Michael Barkun, as a form of “stigmatized knowledge”. Our study will employ a Critical Discourse Analysis framework to bring into focus the ideological semiotics of the current “infodemic” in the EuroAmerican farright’s response to the COVID19 crisis. To some extent, all groups and actors under study exhibited a conspirac ist framework. We contend that conspiracist counterepistemologies are an integral — and increasingly important — part of the semiotics of the new culture wars which have engulfed the COVID19 response.
In the spring of 2020, online discussions revealed two conflicting views on threats posed by the pandemic. Some were very worried about the prospect of infection and mass deaths from the new virus, while others saw the main danger lying in restrictive measures and increased social control. This article is an attempt to answer the question as to why some Russians reacted more sensitively to the epidemiological threat and others to the danger of increased control. Medically sensitive Internet users describe themselves and their opponents in terms of social and cultural differences. Covid dissidents distinguish themselves from their ideological opponents on the criterion of the presence or absence of agency. Sociological studies show that this or that type of sensitivity is determined in part by socio-economic status. The reaction to the pandemic is weakly related to political preferences, but it is influenced by the level of trust in the state and official institutions. In-depth interviews with COVID-dissidents and analysis of their rhetoric in social media show that sensitivity to the threat of control is determined by the personal “setting”, in which the experience of “agency panic” (Timothy Melley) plays an important role. In some people the “panic of agency” triggers the signal “danger of control” in a situation where others perceive the administration of necessary security measures. This signal either “overrides” the signal of a biological threat, or encourages a person who is busy asserting his own agency to cope with a biological threat without the participation of authorities and official experts, in the most autonomous mode.
Protests against efforts toward coronavirus vaccination in 2020 and 2021 received significant support among Russian Orthodox “conservatives” or “fundamentalists” who consider vaccination to be a “chipping” that subordinates a person to hostile forces in preparation for the reign of the antichrist. The article examines the features of the conspiracy eschatology of modern Orthodox conservatives based on specific forms of ontology, aesthetics and social imagination. Abbot Roman Zagrebnev’s collected essays Deeds of Light and Deeds of Darkness (2016) and a number of other sources are used as empirical material for the analysis of these forms. The loss of a person’s individual agency as well as pollution, understood both in the moral and physiological sense, play a particular role in the social concept of conservative Orthodox. Each of these issues are discussed and represented with the help of bodily images and metaphors. The article attempts to see the meaning of conservative Orthodoxy not only through the prism of political ideals, social crises, and eschatological mythopoetics, but also through the connection of this particular type apocalyptic imagination of this kind and ideological holism as a crypto-ontology. The ‘holistic principle’ implies mutual conditionality and constant connection of physiological, moral and social categories and phenomena. This operates within concepts of an “expanded body” as an entity that is exposed to constant risks of pollution and loss of autonomy. In this context, the fear of vaccination, understood as both a form of physiological desecration and a means of social control, turns out to be a natural continuation of a broader ideological or ontological program that opposes the reductionist and discrete ideas about the world characteristic of late modern Western culture.
DIRECT SPEECH
BENJAMIN. DAS PASSAGEN-WERK IN PROGRESS
Between 1927 and 1940, Walter Benjamin collected and systematized material around the Paris market arcades — their history, economics, architecture, and socio-communicative nature. The Arcades Project (Passagenarbeit) was never completed and appeared only in summary form during the philosopher’s life (Paris: Capital of the Nineteenth Century) and in fragments within a number of essays. The greater part of the manuscript was made up of 36 thematically organized files (fashion, leisure, the flaneur, interior, progress, etc.) and labelled with roman numerals, but not gathered together into a single volume. These fragments consisted of quotes in German and French from literature and documents of the 19th and 20th centuries. They are excerpts from historical tractates, libretti, memoirs, advertising prospectuses, and notices. Within Arcades the author’s reflections serve as framing devices that conceptually link these documents together, more rarely, they serve as the primary content of individual sections. Benjamin considered his project to be a non-linear text (like the panels of Aby Warburg’s Memnosyne Atlas) where each image would take part in a retrospective uncovering under the critique of ‘capitalism as religion’ and in unmasking the system of connections that enable us to ‘awaken’ from ‘the dream of history’. Without explicating links between objects and phenomena, Benjamin rather made use of constructive elements of display, overlap, and mounting that moved expression from abstract analysis to mimetic reconstruction. This article examines the history of the Arcades Project, illustrates its methodological and aesthetic principles, and links with Benjamin’s philosophical conception. It also prefaces the publication of Arcades: Convolute A introduces the joint project of Versus and Ad Marginem Press with the aim of publishing a complete commentary to Benjamin’s text.
REVIEW
This article provides an overview of theoretical efforts to overcome nation-centrism that have been undertaken in various fields of social science, including political science, cultural studies, social anthropology and macrosociology, migration studies, and social philosophy, from the 1990s. The opposition to nationalism, characteristic of the academic literature of that time, was conducted mainly on the epistemological plane; i.e., within the framework of polemics engaging “methodological nationalism”. The researchers who defended the positions of “transnationalism” and/or “post-nationalism” dissociated themselves from nation-centric perspectives to the extent that they hindered the productive analysis of transformations of social reality. However, there was an ideological and normative component to this dissociation. Nationalism was unacceptable for many scientists both as a methodology and also as a worldview. Since cosmopolitanism was the main opponent of the nationalist worldview, critics of nationalism were obliged to turn to its associated concepts. The problematic nature of such an appeal, however, lies in the fact that the cosmopolitan tradition of Western academic literature developed mainly within a liberal ideological fold. This led toward efforts to reset cosmopolitanism as an articulation of the left-leaning agenda. This present article focuses on “critical cosmopolitanism”. If the nationalist view sees the condition for the possibility of solidarity in the very fact of community, then the critical-cosmopolitan view is that solidarity can arise from a general disagreement with oppression (in whatever forms the latter may manifest itself). Community, therefore, does not precede solidarity, but is the result of the process of its formation. The author of the article analyses and revises the terms necessary to discuss the formation of solidarity and the fight against oppression, and offers an attempt to comprehend the possibility of a post-national world.
ISSN 2782-3679 (Online)