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Technological Utopia, End Times and the SARS-CoV-2 Crisis: A Genealogy of Crisis Ideoscapes and Mediascapes. In Communication+1, 8(1), http://www.communicationplusone.org/ https://scholarworks.umass.edu/cpo/vol8/iss1/8
Abstract
Abstract: SARS-CoV-2 and the disease it produces, COVID-19, have not only produced a “public health crisis,” but also triggered a “crisis in public confidence,” exacerbating the extant “polarization crisis” seen as dividing the American public. In this charged context, knowledge has become highly politicized, with many counter-narratives circulating regarding the nature and heritage of viral risk and the intentions and effects of official responses. Fraught meanings prevent consensus on the nature of the COVID-19 crisis and the appropriateness of responses even while semantic undecidability is rendered moot as the crisis is legally officiated in “lockdowns” and mask mandates. This project explores the idea of crisis through the lens of history, philosophy, science and medicine to understand the complex genealogy of the term in western culture and the relevance of this genealogy for contemporary crisis deployments, such as the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.
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Rumors and conspiracy theories thrive in environments of low confidence and low trust. Consequently, it is not surprising that ones related to the COVID-19 pandemic are proliferating given the lack of scientific consensus on the virus’s spread and containment, or on the long-term social and economic ramifications of the pandemic. Among the stories currently circulating in US-focused social media forums are ones suggesting that the 5G telecommunication network activates the virus, that the pandemic is a hoax perpetrated by a global cabal, that the virus is a bio-weapon released deliberately by the Chinese, or that Bill Gates is using it as cover to launch a broad vaccination program to facilitate a global surveillance regime. While some may be quick to dismiss these stories as having little impact on real-world behavior, recent events including the destruction of cell phone towers, racially fueled attacks against Asian Americans, demonstrations espousing resistance to public health orders, and wide-scale defiance of scientifically sound public mandates such as those to wear masks and practice social distancing, countermand such conclusions. Inspired by narrative theory, we crawl social media sites and news reports and, through the application of automated machine-learning methods, discover the underlying narrative frameworks supporting the generation of rumors and conspiracy theories. We show how the various narrative frameworks fueling these stories rely on the alignment of otherwise disparate domains of knowledge, and consider how they attach to the broader reporting on the pandemic. These alignments and attachments, which can be monitored in near real time, may be useful for identifying areas in the news that are particularly vulnerable to reinterpretation by conspiracy theorists. Understanding the dynamics of storytelling on social media and the narrative frameworks that provide the generative basis for these stories may also be helpful for devising methods to disrupt their spread.
This chapter begins with the proposal that understanding populism needs to be supplemented by an understanding of how populism itself is understood discursively (and not primarily by populists). The chapter orients itself through a rephrasing of Dick Hebdige on youth: in the 21st century, populism only arises as a category when it is a problem . The aim here is thus not to understand populism as such but examine how and why it is “problematized.” Building on my work on conspiracy panics, I want to posit three main dimensions of the contemporary problematizing discourse about populism: 1) it is associated with political extremism; 2) it entails defining a collective political subject (the people) in opposition to others (e.g. the public); and 3) it articulates the collective political subject to key media forms. Such a discourse analysis allows researchers and social actors to better reflect on their own positions vis a vis populism, as well as tease out the different components of an often confusing and overstretched concept.
Since the SARS outbreak 18 years ago, a large number of severe acute respiratory syndrome-related coronaviruses (SARSr-CoV) have been discovered in their natural reservoir host, bats1–4. Previous studies indicated that some of those bat SARSr-CoVs have the potential to infect humans5–7. Here we report the identification and characterization of a novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) which caused an epidemic of acute respiratory syndrome in humans in Wuhan, China. The epidemic, which started from 12 December 2019, has caused 2,050 laboratory-confirmed infections with 56 fatal cases by 26 January 2020. Full-length genome sequences were obtained from five patients at the early stage of the outbreak. They are almost identical to each other and share 79.5% sequence identify to SARS-CoV. Furthermore, it was found that 2019-nCoV is 96% identical at the whole-genome level to a bat coronavirus. The pairwise protein sequence analysis of seven conserved non-structural proteins show that this virus belongs to the species of SARSr-CoV. The 2019-nCoV virus was then isolated from the bronchoalveolar lavage fluid of a critically ill patient, which can be neutralized by sera from several patients. Importantly, we have confirmed that this novel CoV uses the same cell entry receptor, ACE2, as SARS-CoV.
Emerging infectious diseases, such as SARS and Zika, present a major threat to public health1–3. Despite intense research efforts, how, when and where new diseases appear are still the source of considerable uncertainly. A severe respiratory disease was recently reported in the city Wuhan, Hubei province, China. Up to 25th of January 2020, at least 1,975 cases have been reported since the first patient was hospitalized on the 12th of December 2019. Epidemiological investigation suggested that the outbreak was associated with a seafood market in Wuhan. We studied one patient who was a worker at the market, and who was admitted to Wuhan Central Hospital on 26th of December 2019 experiencing a severe respiratory syndrome including fever, dizziness and cough. Metagenomic RNA sequencing4 of a bronchoalveolar lavage fluid sample identified a novel RNA virus from the family Coronaviridae, designed here as WH-Human-1 coronavirus. Phylogenetic analysis of the complete viral genome (29,903 nucleotides) revealed that the virus was most closely related (89.1% nucleotide similarity) to a group of SARS-like coronaviruses (genus Betacoronavirus, subgenus Sarbecovirus) previously sampled from bats in China. This outbreak highlights the ongoing capacity of viral spill-over from animals to cause severe disease in humans.
This article furthers the debate on the political implications of the Anthropocene – the most recent geological epoch marked by catastrophic environmental change – by engaging it through the lens of political theology. The article starts from the observation that discourses on the Anthropocene and related political projects are deeply influenced by a linear temporality and a common orientation towards the threat of the end of time. It distinguishes three competing discourses of the Anthropocene, eco-catastrophism, eco-modernism and planetary realism. The article analyses how these discourses invoke and update key symbols, images, and storylines of Christian political theology. Furthermore, it studies how each discourse mobilises these secularised Christian motifs to promote competing planet political projects. Each of these projects develops a different position towards the unfolding planetary crisis and the related threat of the end of time. Eco-catastrophism calls for a planetary emergency management, eco-modernism promotes ongoing experimentation with the planet, whereas planetary realism translates into what could be called a ‘realpolitik of resilience’. Revealing the Western theological roots of the Anthropocene and planet politics is essential if the emerging literature on the Anthropocene wants to live up to its promise of pluralising and decolonising IR.
Experts, news media, and social media commentators struggled to make sense of SARS-CoV-2 January–May 2020 as disease caused by this virus, COVID-19, circulated the globe. This paper represents a longitudinal analysis of the primary narratives produced across expert, media, and social media sources to describe the virus, its phylogenetic origins, and biological effects. High expert uncertainty coupled with amplifying representations of risk across time drove collective sensemaking and conspiratorial narratives.
Nous assistons aujourd’hui à un retour des épidémies qui conduit à faire de l’épidémiologie la discipline médicale reine, la nouvelle conseillère du pouvoir. La médicalisation de l’existence franchit un pas supplémentaire dans l’effacement des subjectivités au profit d’une logique de gestion des populations. La nouvelle politique de santé publique (preparedness) qui s’impose depuis les années 1990 conduit à nous interroger sur l’avenir du soin et de la démocratie menacés par ce nouveau totalitarisme sanitaire.
Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality is widely used throughout the social sciences to analyse the state, liberalism, and individual subjectivity. Surprisingly, what remains ignored are the repeated claims made by Foucault throughout his seminal Security, Territory, Population lectures (2007) that governmentality depends more fundamentally on a specific form of time, than on the state or the subject. By paying closer attention to Foucault’s comments on political temporality, this article reveals that governmentality emerged from, and depends upon, a very specific cosmological order that experiences time as indefinite: what Foucault calls our modern ‘indefinite governmentality’. This is elaborated here in three ways. First, by reviewing the transformation from a linear Christian cosmology to our modern indefinite governmentality through what Foucault calls the ‘de-governmentalization of the cosmos’. Second, by arguing that our experience of indefinite temporality was concretised by the geological discovery of ‘deep time’. Third, by engaging a contemporary geological concept that returns humanity to its lost cosmological centrality, thereby re-governing the cosmos: the Anthropocene, or the ‘human epoch’. Analysed using indefinite governmentality, Foucault’s forewarning of an ‘end of history’ is implicit in the new concept of the Anthropocene’s origins and ends. If it is the paradigm shift its proponents claim, then it threatens to end the temporality of the state, the subject, and governmentality itself.