Issue 177, August 2023
Reflections on the Pandemic
This special issue revisits the Thesis Eleven online project: Living and Thinking Crisis. The original project published almost fifty contributions; a multimedia presentation that included postcards, words, poems and music responding to the COVID19 pandemic in the real-time of its making. This issue of the journal brings a selection of these to publication and reflects on this moment of global upheaval and transformation.
Introduction to COVID special issue
Peter Beilharz and Sian Supski
COVID took over our lives, after its onset into 2020. For we two, this meant frequent lockdowns, in our home city of Melbourne, and being denied access to our other home, in Chengdu in China. Home took on some new meanings, not all of them cheerful. Electronic forms of communication became both more habitual and more intense. Our global relationships flourished, around the journal and this dedicated online project.
The project was framed in a double deadline: by the immediacy of its production, and the implicit retrospective in the plan to ask contributors to look back, to revisit their own pieces with hindsight. Here are the results. Some contributors chose or were able to revisit. Others simply let their earlier views stand. There are good reasons and motivations for both possible responses.
Now that the new normal is normal again, what is to be learned from all this? As we anticipated above, there was and there would be a strong desire for the possibility of return to business as usual. A sense of later lost opportunities was also manifest. So we return to the pressing demands of everyday life, and the large-looming prospects of the end of the world and fascism alongside and integrated with the battered dreams of democracy in the political interim. Deadlines change. Counting bodies, lost lives and life chances gives way to counting flyer points and checking travel plans again.
Hopes for civic repair persist. There was no shortage of creative imagination set loose. Creativity may well be one possible response to adversity. But the lessons are no more clear than they were before. Modernity limps, except perhaps in cities like Chengdu, where it is still to all outward appearances striding onwards, progress as the metanarrative, the pursuit of the good life on the streets.
Our best achievement is evident in the riches and diversity of the responses, both in this issue of Thesis Eleven and on the original webpage. We went hunting for multimedia and for the not so usual suspects, for reports and postcards, words, poems and music. We asked Ian Collard to perform and narrate Sonny Boy Williamson II, ‘Help Me’; a perfect momentary gesture at closure, moving on when we were unable to move on. These days we might call for Little Walter, Collard’s main man: ‘Crazy Mixed Up World’. Let’s Dance! in the comfort of knowing at least that we do not dance alone.
We thank all our contributors to this print issue and the original online special. At a time when life as we knew it seemed to be ending, in suspension, our online connections and friendships held us. And we waited…we are grateful.
Articles:
Eleven theses or hypotheses on the way out of the pandemic
Written while the pandemic was still a key issue, this article tries to imagine the post-pandemic from different perspectives, and first of all in distinct temporalities. A question arises immediately: how can we consider the hypothesis of a deep cultural or anthropological mutation with intellectual or scientific tools that were forged before this mutation? What might new approaches for the social sciences look like? The article proceeds to analyse the more obvious social, technological and cultural changes that occurred with the pandemic, which definitively modify our perception and understanding of globalisation. New or renewed inequalities, intergenerational tensions, racism, increasing fake news and conspiracy theory visions of the world, but also issues raised by feminism or ecology are at stake here.
Between the acts: At home in uncertain times
Written during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, this short essay reflects on a changing world in the midst of major upheaval. Bringing together the philosophical thought of the late Agnes Heller with the historical meditations expressed in Virginia Woolf’s final novel Between the Acts, the essay attends to the ways that historical transition plays out in the everyday. Writing on the cusp of the Second World War, Woolf is acutely aware of an atmosphere of historical change, and she writes this unease into the everyday transitions of her characters and ambience of the novel. Drawing on Heller’s reflections on notions of home, I consider how our experience of everyday life reflects the undulations of history. Taking Woolf’s prompt, I tune into the ways that the unease of historical transition enters the everyday through a heightened awareness of contingency and growing sense of the uncanny.
A void like the plague: Fragments of domestic theory
This essay is a reflection on Albert Camus’s revival during the COVID-19 pandemic of the early 2020s. The popularity of Camus’s novel, The Plague, is considered alongside his other writing as something that speaks to many throughout their lives. Such appraisal is interspersed with personal reflections on family life during pandemic lockdowns and the ways that Camus’s thought resounds in our everyday selves. Written in two parts at different times – mainly in 2020 and with a 2023 afterthought – the essay critically acknowledges how Camus instructs us to live together with meaning and dignity in an age of catastrophe.
Watching the crown: Tangible uncertainty. A photographic essay of Melbourne in the time of the novel coronavirus
The double-whammy trauma: Narrative and counter-narrative during COVID–Floyd
Written in the early months of the COVID pandemic, and in the midst of the second wave of Black Lives Matters protest, this article suggests that Americans experienced these shocking social events as a double-whammy cultural trauma, as deeply troubling to their collective identity as nation. How the trauma played out would determine the near-term future of American politics. Were the poor and non-white the principal victims of the double whammy, or were white Americans and the ‘hard-working middle class’ actually the injured parties? Who was the trauma’s perpetrator? Was it China, inadequate healthcare, government bureaucracy, or Trump and ‘know-nothing’ populism? The performances that provided the most felicitous answers to such questions would determine whether the country moved to the left or the right in the months before the Presidential election that would take place before year’s end.
#My(white)BodyMyChoice
This article explores the circulation of #MyBodyMyChoice in a series of deeply divisive political debates – abortion rights and mask wearing during COVID-19. We trace the appropriation of this slogan for differing ideological purposes, and its shifts from collective political action concerning pro-choice to the rights of individuals to refuse to comply with mask mandates. Underpinning the values of each is a white liberal racism that operates to uphold dominant gender, class and economic structures.
The pandemic experience and the post-pandemic world prospects
This is a global comparative analysis of the social, political and economic experiences, effects and consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. Part of it was written during an early stage of the pandemic and captures some of the initial reactions of competitive international panic. It demonstrates the new class structuration resulting from the management of the viral onslaught. It distinguishes coping and failing states of the pandemic world, and discusses the reasons for them. It highlights the widespread and rapid abandonment of neoliberal economic policies, a change spearheaded by the former vanguard of neoliberalism, the USA and the UK. The end of neoliberalism is also related to the change of the political economy of the world, from capitalist globalization to imperial and national geopolitics. The decisive reason for the turn was the realization by the US elite in the 2010s that China was winning the game of competitive market globalization. In the new game of geopolitics state interests, state security and state power are paramount. This process had started earlier but was accentuated during the pandemic, and accelerated with the Ukraine war, which also has clarified that the new geopolitical era may be the beginning of the endgame of the semi-millennial western domination of the world. The western powers draw closer together, after the early pandemic free-for-all, while the rest of world increasingly asserts its independence. The article ends with a discussion of the post-pandemic near future in terms of historical post-crisis parallels from European history. Finding ‘1945’ and ‘1932’ inappropriate, in contrast to early hopes and assessments, the conclusion is that the current world of the North most resembles a before- rather than an after-moment, the summer of 1914, when the world ‘sleepwalked’ into the mass slaughter of the First World War.
Outside now: A postcard from quarantine in downtown São Paulo, 2020
Matheus Capovilla Romanetto and Isabela Capovilla Romanetto
We discuss the way the early quarantine period during the coronavirus crisis illuminated some aspects of previous daily life in downtown São Paulo. Changes in our surroundings and withdrawal into confinement elicited a new relationship to the senses and to imagination. With that, it became apparent the degree to which the free use of these faculties is repressed by violence and inequality, as they are usually manifest in the city center. We explore the idea that some of the changes in social interaction, as they became widespread during the pandemic, were already prefigured in the relationship between social classes in this part of town. We then discuss the dependency this has on the spacialization of social inequalities in the urban fabric.
Praying in the pandemic, and after
What is everyday life like under a militarized pandemic where the brute force of the state is deployed to contain an outbreak? What lifeworld is generated against the backdrop of authoritarian control? What holds us together when our lives are quarantined? I will answer these questions by looking at the practice of mass listening. In particular, I look at a recorded prayer to provide a picture of an island life. In this essay, I call attention to what may be termed the vernacular will to life in a carceral regime in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using the oratio imperata as a case study, I think more broadly about the meaning of freedom, restraint, and contingency. Namely, I describe the lifeforce buried in everyday acts of praying wherein repressive social forces, be they the police or religious authorities, come to enable world-making possibilities for ordinary lives in paradoxical ways. I argue that the recorded prayer helps us to grasp the dynamics of repression and agency. Using memoir and ethnography, I propose the theory of vernacular biopoetics to explore the possibility of freedom in a carceral condition wherein the constriction of spaces becomes an opening for alternative forms of imagination.
Health, harm, and habitus: Techniques of the body in COVID-19
This article revisits French sociologist Marcel Mauss’ notion of ‘techniques of the body’ to analyze the emergence of corporeal and behavioral norms instituted to prevent the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. Centering its analysis on the early stages of COVID’s global spread, the article examines a range of everyday, micro-practices that reveal how the pandemic changed our awareness, uses, and assessments of our own and others’ bodies. In a context where to not touch was to care, people often struggled to find a balance between maintaining social civility and sustaining collective health. Failure to adapt the body to pandemic conditions, or instances of COVID faux-pas, resulted in discomfort, embarrassment, or annoyance on the part of those who perceived this behavior as irresponsible, dangerous, and selfish. Changing bodily practices thus became subject to judgment in ways that sometimes obscured the uneven distribution of risk and protection afforded to differently privileged or vulnerable human communities as they grappled with the uncertain phenomenologies of pandemic living and dying. COVID-19 corporealities, both fleshly and virtual, thus reveal the conjoined articulation of the social, biological, cultural, moral, and psychological in our bodily movements, expressions, and assessments. In contrast to Mauss’ theorization, many techniques of the body in the Covidscape were experienced as new, contextual, shifting, and improvised. They spoke to necessity and challenge of articulating a different relationship to the world and to others, enacted in the minute and mundane practices of everyday life, through which macro-level processes and forces are embodied and evaluated.
The virus in the queues
Queues have been at the centre of South Africa’s COVID-19 story. National lockdown was declared on 26 March 2020, around the time ‘month-end’ salaries and government grants are paid out. Within the first few days, reports came of the long lines outside banks and supermarkets, with journalists regularly citing people’s failure to ‘social distance’. This article uses the queue as an analytic tool to explore the unequal vulnerabilities entailed in the experience of COVID-19 lockdown in South Africa.
The lasting significance of viruses: COVID-19, historical moments and social transformations
Three years after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, this article reviews the question of the lasting socio-political significance of the appearance of the virus, much and controversially debated at the beginning. We can see now – maybe rather unsurprisingly – that the expectations of rapid pandemic-related social change, whether positive or negative, were widely exaggerated. Rather, the pandemic has now entered into an interpretation of the global socio-political constellation as marked by a sequence of crises, including the financial crisis of 2008 and after, climate change, COVID-19 and now the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Thus, the task can be rephrased as asking whether these crises push into a similar direction, namely a re-appreciation of authoritative collective action against the laissez-faire view of extending global commerce and communication and, if so, what the consequences of such a re-appreciation may be.
Photography – Empty desire lines: Cape Town under lockdown
Alex Oelofse
Book review
Book review: Capitalism versus Democracy? Rethinking Politics in the Age of Environmental Crisis
Eric Ferris
thesis eleven 