The COVID-19 crisis chronotope : The pandemic as matter,metaphor and memory

Introduction: the crisis chronotope

This article aims to examine the possibility of conceiving and conceptualizing COVID-19 as a crisis chronotope, in terms of its multilayered mappings and experiential encodings of a contagious space–time compression. This concept is used to examine the processes whereby familiar spaces turn to sites of crisis and familiar time gets suspended and mapped on to different dimensions of temporality, with unpredictable and unmappable experiences of suspension and defamiliarization. Through the concept of mnemonic mobility – the movements and intersections of private and shared memory across objects and subjects – the article proposes a theory about how the current pandemic may be re-membered and re-presented as a crisis chronotope in personal as well as in collective imagination, especially in relation to the deterritorialization it wrought at global and local levels. Particularly relevant in the context of India as case study in this article is the re-ontologization of public space and modes of access, exemplified by the extreme and ad hoc re-mappings (the necessary formation of makeshift cremation sites and burial grounds), lockdowns and social distancing decreed and executed at different points of time.

The concept of crisis chronotope is proposed and theorized in this article as a trope that cuts across and combines different material, metonymic, experiential and ontological orders, spreading across several and different points of space and time contagiously connected as well as disconnected by the crisis of COVID-19. This study draws on the idea that the experience of COVID-19 is encoded as a matter which is always already a metaphor, one connoting crisis, contagion and contingency. In doing so, this article examines the possible configurations and emergence of COVID-19 as a complex connective metaphor, in the realm of individual and collective memory. In addition, the article argues that this conflation of mysterious materiality (the medical definitions and theories around the disease and its dissemination keep changing even as the virus mutates with alarming velocity) and complexly connective metaphoricity (the metaphor of COVID-19 stands for and connects a range of meanings from collective disaster to individual alienation) forces us to generate a renewed understanding of space and time as connected categories defined by defamiliarization.

The Bakhtinian chronotope

The Russian Formalist philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin (1984) had described the chronotope as a literary device through which ‘spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out concrete whole’ (p. 84). In his essay on forms of time in the novel, Bakhtin (1984) had defined the chronotope as ‘the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature’ (p. 84). Such relationships emerge, in Bakhtin’s (1984) study, as a ‘continual mutual interaction’ between the work of fiction depicted in the world of the novel and ‘the historically developing social world’ (p. 254). In a related work on Dostoevsky’s poetics, Bakhtin (1984) elaborates the concept of the threshold chronotope, which operates as liminal spatiotemporal as well as experiential categories, exemplified according to Bakhtin by the description of the city of St. Petersburg in Dostoevsky’s writing which stands ‘on the borderline between existence and nonexistence, reality and phantasmagoria, always on the verge of dissipating like the fog and vanishing’ (p. 167). The world of the bildungsroman in Dostoevsky’s fiction is defined by Bakhtin as a space of coexistence rather than one of evolution (Bakhtin, 1984: 28) whereby the subject shifts from the private sphere of the mind and ‘enters into a completely new, spatial sphere of historical existence’ (Bakhtin, 1984: 24). In his study of space–time intersections as represented in fiction, Bakhtin delineates different types of chronotopes. There is thus the chronotope of encounter where several subjects converge and share the same space and time. This is followed by the chronotope of the road which involves spatiotemporal movements usually marked by progress. There is then the chronotope of the threshold where subjects arrive at liminal locations that carry the potential for progress or disaster. As Sue Vice examines, to these types may be added the chronotope of memory which is the trope whereby the human mind moves back and ahead in space and time to recall or anticipate experiences, producing in its wake an entanglement of analeptic (flashback) and proleptic (flashforward) patterns (Vice, 1997: 14).

Chronotopes emerge in Bakhtin’s (1981) study not as independent autonomous units but as complex compressions of space–time which ‘may be interwoven with, replace or oppose one another, contradict one another or find themselves in ever more complex relationships’ (p. 252). Our study departs from the purely literary configurations of the chronotope and offers the concept of the crisis chronotope as a complex and contagiously connected spatiotemporal frame of ontological and experiential dis-orientation shaped by new subject–object assemblages in a shared defamiliarization of matter, metaphor and memory. While doing so, it pays special attention to Bakhtin’s (1981) notion of the thickening of time which ‘takes on flesh’ and becomes visible, while ‘space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot, and history’ (p. 84). The thickening of time and space theorized by Bakhtin carries special resonance, we argue, with the ways in which the COVID-19 crisis may be experienced and re-membered through a process of deceleration and defamiliarization of space and time. This connects to the sociological study of acceleration (Rosa, 2017), which states how the compulsory slowing down of civilian life during COVID-19 generates a renewed understanding of our subjective surroundings which are marked by a shared and sudden spatiotemporal defamiliazation. Hartmut Rosa’s description of the ‘gigantic brakes’ clamping down ‘the incessant wheels of production, movement, and acceleration’ during the COVID-19 crisis bears strong resonance with Bakhtin’s theory of thickening of time (Rosa, 2020). In the same interview, Rosa highlights the speeding up of digitization and the locking down of the physical world due to the pandemic where touchless transactions become the normative social practices even as the very ontology of the social is defined by distancing. Alluding to Paul Virilio’s sociological work on speed and polar inertia, Rosa underlines the temporal transformation of the post-pandemic world further by highlighting how ‘material mobility is reduced to almost zero’ due to lockdowns and regulated access, while data assume the speed of photons, creating the complex condition of a ‘hyper-accelerated standstill’ (Rosa, 2020) pointing to the experiential entanglement of access and absence. The spatiotemporal encodings invested in the connective metaphor of COVID-19 correspond interestingly and theoretically, we argue, to the concept of the crisis chronotope that describes and dramatizes ontological and experiential dis-orientations across mutable intersections of space and time. This article offers a theoretical study of examining COVID-19 as a chronotope that vacillates between material and metaphoric markers, while also entering the emergent and connective modes of memory, re-cognition and remapping of spatiotemporal frames.

The concept of the chronotope as a useful medium and narrative category in memory studies gains ground from some current work done in psychology on the need to examine time–space continuum for a fuller understanding of scenic memory. Paula Reavey’s (2017) work is particularly relevant here as she examines how ‘a greater coupling of time-space’ contributes significantly to ‘fully grasp the scenes and settings of our memorial experiences, that are then temporally appropriated by our narrative activities’ (p. 107). Time–space emerges in such study as a set of relations which incorporate human subjects as well as material objects and which produces a fluid framework of memory through subject–object interactivity. In addition, this psychological approach appropriates an expanded model of memory which views the mind as an extended activity apropos of space and time. What Kurt Lewin, one of the key and foundational figures in organizational psychology, defines as life-space, essentially emerges as a multidimensional model of interconnections whereby the subject is situated in a real space and time which also connects to earlier experiences and events in a different spatiotemporal frame through what Lewin classifies as quasi-physical causes that determine actions and agency. In a similar vein, Lewin highlights the quasi-conceptual components that determine the subject’s anticipation of the future, again through a multidimensional mapping of current and prospective orders of space and time (Lewin, 1936). This multidimensional understanding of space and time receives increasing interest in memory studies today which argues in favour of how empirical research should integrate with theoretical frameworks ‘to shine light on the messy work that is human meaning making via remembering activities’ (Reavey, 2017: 110).

Chronotope in memory studies

Drawing on Bakhtin’s study of fictional figures in the novel, chronotopes may be mapped in memory studies for a renewed understanding of multidimensional spatiotemporal experiences and identities. This appears in the theorization of chronotopic lamination by Paul Prior and Jody Shipka (2002), which is defined as the ‘dispersed and fluid chains of places, times, people, and artifacts that come together in trajectories of literate action’ (p. 181). Similarly, drawing on Bakhtin’s literary formulations and similar theoretical models of situating fictional figures and their experiences in space and time, Milbourne and Hallenbeck (2013) offer the theory of the material chronotope, an ‘assemblage of texts, spaces, times, and objects’ defined as ‘a spatio-temporal user orientation produced and stabilized through users’ routinized and embodied performances’ (p. 403). Such material chronotopes – Milbourne and Hallenbeck (2013) offer the example of the emergence of the eighteenth-century microscope – draws on the theory that ‘orientations produced by material-rhetorical assemblages can influence not just literate activities but a broad range of meaningful practices, such as technology use’ (p. 405). The chronotopic combination of matter and materiality is of special significance in this study, as it examines ways in which matter produced and experienced during the current pandemic – including medical masks, sanitizers, vaccines, essential and non-essential goods – generates special metaphoric and mnemonic associations in a defamiliarized cognitive frame. The pandemic in itself may be described as a mysterious and menacing matter with imminent waves of infection and mutating virus whose medical materiality cannot be perfectly determined or addressed. More significantly, it has re-ontologized matter and familiar materiality in private as well as collective imagination and memory, not least by the compulsory practice of touchlessness and social distancing. Indeed, the non-tactile mode of engagement with matter during the pandemic, especially in the public space, has generated a new ontology of materiality defined by touchlessness, compulsory cleansing and distance. The crisis chronotope in our study is thus also constituted by a combination of defamiliarized matter and a remapped engagement with materiality, which is selective, suspicious and metonymic in quality.

As evident in the study cited above, the chronotope appears in multiple frameworks as a form of social, material and cognitive orientation which also connects to complex questions around ‘production and transformation of gender relations’ (Milbourne and Hallenbeck, 2013: 405) through an examination of mutable and context-sensitive embodied engagements and subject–object interactivity. We draw on this theory of the chronotope as material and embodied orientations and examine how the theory of crisis chronotope we propose apropos of the COVID-19 pandemic underlines the subject–object dis-orientations and defamiliarizations in space–time at ontological and experiential levels, which also affects the memory of events and experiences. Even in anthropological studies, chronotopic configurations are examined as ‘disseminated through intersubjectively ratified metasemiotic practices and recycled into group-centric interpersonal routines’ (Agha, 2015: 404) exemplified in Milbourne and Hallenbeck’s (2013: 405) study of the chronotopic orientation of suburban consumer in an American shopping mall. The metasemiotic quality of chronotopic combinations in such anthropological studies may be compared to what we define as mnemonic mobility whereby subjects and objects establish a shared spatiotemporal economy of encoding, effacing, remembering and representation which is metaphoric, metonymic and mutable in quality. We apply this theory of mnemonic mobility to map the crisis of COVID-19 in terms of how the volatility of memory and experience in the pandemic-marked world corresponds to the need to remember space–time as connected and compressed conditions, episodically as well as collectively.

The chronotopic combinations in anthropological studies, while drawing on the Bakhtinian theorization of the term (Bakhtin, 1981) also extends it on to a study of kinship systems that operate around collective rituals and events involving criterial behaviours in shared slices of space and time. Chronotopic combinations can also operate, as Jodie Nicotra and Judith Parrish (2010) reveal in their study, through politics of privilege, whereby ‘certain chronotopes can become dominant to the exclusion of others in public arguments’ (p. 216), a case in point being wealthy biotechnology companies’ use of space–time compression to manufacture genetically modified food (GMF), against opposition from other chronotopes (in favour of delayed space and time for testing) put forward by the precautionary principles of environmentalists. What emerges in such study – conducted by a rhetorician and a paleoclimatologist – is how concealed chronotopes often offer what Stephen Jay Gould defines as deep time or planetary perspectives on temporality (Gould, 1987) which are often buried under the dominant chronotopes that characterize public policy and short-term public memory (Nicotra and Parrish, 2010: 216–217). At the level of policy-formation and memory-selection, such studies in rhetoric and past climates also reveal how during ‘any given moment in public discourse, multiple chronotopes compete and jostle for dominance’ (Nicotra and Parrish, 2010: 230). One can thus immediately see the connections between chronotopes and memory-formations in terms of how dominant and concealed orders of space–time inform as well as re-form shared understanding and experiences of lived reality, and the knowledge-narratives that contribute and contest to qualify the same.

The COVID-19 crisis emerges as a resurfacing of concealed chronotopes in terms of foregrounding several social, environmental, political and cultural concerns which were buried under the more dominant arguments: unregulated flow of global capital, expansionist business policies backed by powerful governments, denial of climate crisis and irresponsible consumerism, to name a few. In addition, the planetary interconnectedness created by the COVID-19 crisis literalizes the metaphor of shared space and time and turns the same into a chronotopic compression which is also a spatiotemporal deceleration and defamiliarization at the anthropocentric level. It forces us to remember as individual subjects with unique life stories as well as mapping that private memory onto an awareness of deep planetary time in the face of a crisis that has evolved into becoming a fundamental threat to human existence in this planet. The metaphor and the chronotope of COVID-19 thus becomes a multidimensional memory of human space and time which undercuts and unsettles what May and Thrift (2001) define as ‘a simple picture of speed and acceleration’ informing the dominant chronotope of human life and instead generating an ‘awareness of living within a multiplicity of times, a number of which might be moving at different speeds and even in different directions’ (p. 12). There is thus a coupling together of shared space and time which is characterized by a shared sense of precarity and vulnerability, along with an awareness that such coupling and sense of sharing are also actually informed by isolation, multiple temporalities and alienation, whereby the very ontology of the social is qualified and defined by distancing. The globality of the COVID-19 crisis therefore ironically undercuts the ontology and experience of global time, one which is usually constituted by ‘multiple horizons of existential, intergenerational, and historical time’ (Chakrabarty, 2019: 24). The crisis chronotope of COVID-19, we argue, is characterized and experientially marked by this ambivalence of compressed spatiotemporal connectedness and existential disconnect, whereby subjects share an infected time and space which also necessitates a distance which is defined as a social norm, avoidance of touch and only partially visible self.

Memory, crisis and connective metaphors

Comparable to the crisis chronotope as used in this article is the notion of connective metaphor as tropes that tie disconnected subjects and objects inhabiting shared space and time, through a movement of materials, meanings and memory. This concept of the connective metaphor as a tool to examine a crisis-ridden world of un-certain meanings and materiality may be mapped on to the phenomenon of COVID-19 which itself has emerged as a metaphor for global contagion, crisis and panic, connecting as well as disconnecting subjects and objects while defamiliarizing standard notions and erstwhile experiences of time and space. In his philosophical treatise, Time and Narrative, Paul Ricoeur underlines the importance of metaphors of movements in memory as examined in the philosophy of Augustine, in terms of how chosen figures of speech condense experiences and the process of their remembrance spatiotemporally. Examining the affect and intent in the remembering process, Ricoeur (1983) foregrounds how those combine through the ‘progressive dynamization of the metaphor of the spaces traversed by expectation, attention and memory’ (p. 21). Defining the good metaphor and the living metaphor as processes of ‘passing away’ or ‘ceasing’ and that of ‘passing through’ or ‘relegating’, Ricoeur (1983) argues that the ‘metaphor of the transit of events through the present seems unsurpassable’ (p. 21). In a related study, The Rule of Metaphor, Ricoeur draws on Humboldt’s thesis on discourse as a combination of infinite uses of finite means as underlined by the ‘extended function’ (Ricoeur, 1995: 72) of the figure trope (the metaphor) in memory, while also foregrounding the generative potential to ‘give colour, to astonish and surprise through new and unexpected combinations’ (Ricoeur, 1995: 73). This dual potential to condense experience as well as to generate astonishment through imagination renders metaphor a key affective role in a study of memory, especially in the COVID-19 world where the relationships between subjects and objects, between material and meaning, are constantly and ontologically mutated and renegotiated.

Metaphor may thus be seen as a representative narrative instrument through which the complex of information and interpretation so crucial to memory plays out in space and time in the human mind. Through their dual coding of verbal and visual information, whereby meanings operate at linguistic as well as pictorial levels, what we here call connective metaphors play a key role in remembering, as corroborated by works in psychology as well as in philosophy of mind. The Dutch psychologist Douwe Draaisma examines this connection in his remarkable study Metaphors of Memory where he delineates three key functions of metaphors in the remembering process. First, the verbal–visual bind offered by metaphors generates a ‘dual coding’ that emerges as a ‘cognitive investment which pays off in the reproduction phase’. Second, the image offered by the metaphor also plays the role of ‘an integrated package or “chunk” and can also be reproduced again as a coherent whole’ (Draaisma, 2001: 17). Finally, the vehicle of the metaphor can serve as what Draaisma (2001) defines as a ‘conceptual peg on which more abstract terms can be hung’ (p. 17), thus corroborating the extended quality metaphors contribute towards the cognitive and remembering process. The threefold function of metaphors in memory plays key role in the information, interpretation, and preservation of images and experiences through a complex mechanism of abstractions and attachments, which are embedded as well as enactive and extended in quality, whereby ‘Metaphor enables the memory function to fish with several hooks at once’ (Draaisma, 2001: 17). Likewise, the analogy Draaisma makes between the attrition of a metaphor due to wearing down – culminating in the product of the dead metaphor – and the loss of memory due to depletion, also underlines the narrative quality invested in processes of remembering and forgetting.

COVID-19 as matter and metaphor

The reconfigured matter – including the mutating virus, facial masks, sanitizers, vaccines and contactless objects – has generated a remapped engagement with materiality characterizing the COVID-19 world marked by a fundamental change in trust and tactility. Matter in the COVID-19 world is therefore almost always metonymic, appearing partially and almost always engaged with suspicion, un-certainty and circumspection. The altered ontology and engagement with materiality have been accentuated by the loss of trust and touch, whereby unknown objects and subjects both appear with possibilities of infection and contagion. The matter and metaphor of the pandemic are thus really and metaphorically viral. The material, metaphorical and the chronotopic crisis of COVID-19 operates at the corporeal, cultural and epistemic registers through its productions of conditions which create what Kaja Silverman (1992) had defined elsewhere as ‘historical trauma’, generating collective as well as episodic experiences that are always already memories, ones that ‘interrupt or even deconstitute what a society assumes to be its master narratives’ (p. 55). Along with causing around 3.5 million human deaths across the world and irredeemable losses in professions and properties, the crisis of COVID-19 has brought about some immediate and perhaps permanent changes at political, social and cultural levels, including an unsettling awareness of vulnerability, inequality and precarity across the world; an accelerated usage of and reliance on automation of the contactless kind; increasing insecurity in global food systems; and a heightened culture of disinformation (deliberately incorrect) and misinformation (inadvertently incorrect) related to the disease and its dissemination.

The industry of incorrect information in medical and political orders through an explosion of narratives in various channels in social media prompted the World Health Organisation (WHO) to officially acknowledge the ‘infodemic that has raced ahead of the pandemic, complicating response efforts by promoting false cures, erroneous information, and conspiracy theories’ (Brannen et al., 2020: 19). The varying experiential and cultural accounts of COVID-19 across a spectrum of settings make its liminal location and movement between matter and metaphor complex and contingent. In a real as well as in a symbolic sense, the COVID-19 world is a lived experience and a memory simultaneously, a defamiliarized space and a slice of time experienced and remembered together, through a process of un-certain encoding and alternative embodiment constituted by masks and medical norms. The simultaneity of experiencing and re-membering generated by the COVID-19 crisis also creates a convergence of matter and metaphor, in terms of how the crisis is cognized and re-cognized simultaneously with immediacy and semantic slipperiness, as most people one meets in the sporadic access to public spaces during the COVID-19 pandemic appear only partially visible and will be re-membered metonymically in their partial presence. This asymmetric entanglement of partial memory, metonymic identifiability and metaphoricity exemplified by the experience of COVID-19 connects complexly, this article argues, to the concept of the crisis chronotope that offers a unique combination of materiality, memory and possibility through compressed spatiotemporal frames connected as well as disconnected by a pandemic and its resultant paranoia and panic. The crisis chronotope of COVID-19, we argue, is characterized by incomplete intersubjectivity and interfacial interactivity in a shared and contagious space–time, where subjects appear and are medico-legally required to appear only as partial presences, not to be touched or trusted, with masks and with social distancing, marking a metonymic memory of partial faces and nervous moments when interactions carry possibilities of infection. The non-tactile interactive economy of subjects and objects in the COVID-19 world merge matter and metaphor in encoded experiences which become memory, one which is necessarily incomplete and metonymic in quality.

The medical, scientific and cultural confusion and uncertainty around the disease and its dissemination dramatize the ontological complexity of this pandemic, which is connective as well as disruptive in its all-pervasive presence as well as in its production of alienation and absence. The COVID-19 crisis chronotope – as an abruptly defamiliarized as well as suspended slice of space–time – carries the embedded and enactive quality of experiences and forms of remembering which are existential as well as social in their mappings of materials and minds. In particular, this study underlines the remapping of social, digital and psychic markers with the emergence of COVID-19 crisis and how the reality and phenomenality of the pandemic problematize the temporality of experience, re-cognition and re-membering at private as well as at shared collective levels. Especially pertinent in the context of this study is the inconclusive temporal quality of the pandemic and how the pre-pandemic world is re-membered as a distinctly different experiential and ontological order marked by more mobility, tactility, intimacy and trust. Indeed, the endless temporality produced by the pandemic – with no sign of its closure or knowledge of its resolution – informs and is informed by the ontological un-certainty about its contagious condition. The COVID-19 crisis chronotope may therefore be examined as a disruption as well as a departure from the erstwhile normative models and experiences of space and time. It thus corresponds to new modes of re-membering and re-cognition that are located between lived reality and partial potentiality, an ambivalence uniquely accommodated and articulated by the space–time compression which also incorporates an interactive and inconclusive economy of matter, metaphor and memory at experiential and narrative levels.

COVID crisis, memory and politics

Rachel Kyte (2020), in her study of political power, COVID-19 and our global future, draws on the political changes wrought by the Plague of Athens in 430 BC and argues how countries manage the crisis through generating a ‘collective sense of heroism’, sacrifice and identity ‘may form a powerful shared memory’ (p. 5). The crisis and the memory generated by the COVID-19 pandemic is an ontologically ongoing and mutable phenomenon that is medical, political and existential in quality. While scientists, medical practitioners and researchers continue to examine the biochemical nature of the virus and its several strains, it may also be worthwhile to explore the various narrative structures that are produced out of this pandemic. The literary and cognitive theorist Fritz Breithaupt describes five narrative patterns as representative possibilities emerging out of the COVID-19 crisis. First, there is the narrative about the Coronavirus causing a dent in normal life, followed by a return to the normal. This is a narrative of assurance. The second narrative, bleaker and more coercive, is one of total control, where safety and normalcy can only be created with absolute surveillance using technologies that capture and contain data. The third narrative is one of collective action where hoarding is replaced by sharing and co-creating, from masks to joint class action, whereby the Coronavirus is countered and defeated collectively. The fourth narrative is one of depression where subjects can only connect in virtual worlds of Facebook, Zoom or Skype where they fidget with their machines and experience absence and alienation. The fifth and final narrative pattern Breithaupt classifies is one of the failures of strong ego-driven leadership whereby powerful megalomaniacal political leaders fall and fail, creating solidarity among students leading to formations of global corporations and protection of causes such as climate change (Breithaupt, 2021).

Breithaupt’s description of narrative patterns in the times of the COVID-19 crisis foregrounds the complex chronotopic and metaphoric associations the virus has assumed in the cultural imaginary, from one of global menace to that of humility and collective responsibility. What gets amply evident in these narrative patterns is a remapping of reality and spatiotemporality through storytelling structures which contribute towards encoding the event of the pandemic through figurative and fictional registers. Fiction’s ability, as Sara Ahmed (2011) argues, to ‘reach out of fiction, almost like a hand that comes up and comes out of the grave’, signifying persistence, protest, as well as a desire to establish ‘connection to others’ (p. 249) offers a unique epistemic and representational instrument with which the simultaneity of experiencing and remembering through re-encoding generated by the COVID-19 crisis can be curated. This is especially accentuated by the generational quality of the pandemic whereby an entire generation, especially the formative one, gets suspended in a closed space–time compression and are forced to ‘realize through an almost uncanny global simultaneity the connectedness of the planet’ (Erll, 2020: 868). This experience of planetary interconnectedness is ironically produced out of a crisis which necessitates physical and social isolation that contributes to an ontological transformation of earlier experiences of reality, recognizability and tactility. This article makes the argument that, at a narrative and representational level, this remapping of recognizability in the post-COVID world problematizes the difference between matter and metaphor, between sign and identity, through a complex convergence of privately embodied and collectively consumed memory.

In its philosophical and epistemic scope, this article acknowledges the fundamental ontological ongoing-ness and experiential uncertainty of the COVID-19 world and draws on Astrid Erll’s (2020) work which examines how memory studies, ‘a field invested in studying the remembrance and resonance of historical events ex post facto, could address a global occurrence in the present, while it is unfolding into an event’ (p. 862). The encoding of the ongoing event into memory is shaped by cognitive, existential and narrative uncertainties as narratives about the virus and its dissemination keep changing even as the virus itself continues to mutate. Erll (2020) studies how the shared and existentially private experience of the pandemic produces what Hans-Georg Gadamer defines as ‘desperate uncertainty’ while also exhibiting ‘diverse logics of memory and the kind of complex entanglements between pasts, presents and futures’ that memory studies as a field can critically address (p. 862). Erll’s (2020) examination engages with the spatiotemporal changes in the post-COVID-19 world where the quotidian quality of memory and remembering has been defamiliarized with a clear indication of how ‘seemingly “natural patterns” of social time can break down, and be thoroughly repatterned’ (p. 862). The cognitive remapping of the COVID-19 world whereby the failures of global capitalism get nakedly evident also generates, as a moral imperative, the need to practise what Gayatri Spivak (1994) defines elsewhere as ‘a persistent critique of what [we] cannot not want’ (p. 278). It also offers a perspective on planetarity as proposed by Spivak, one which undercuts the ‘excessive visibility’ of globalization and instead ‘provides a means to think through – but not necessarily to represent – that which is rendered invisible’, primarily by ‘being a method of reading that defamiliarizes’ familiar space and time (DeLoughrey, 2019: 65–66).

COVID memory, metaphor and apocalyptic narratives

As several participants of the 2020 science fiction symposium Thinking through the Pandemic argue, the novel destructive quality of the Coronavirus lay not so much in ‘the event of its emergence’ but in the ‘totality of its effect on the imagination, one that rivalled the most ambitious tropes of sf and made apocalypse and dystopia the lexicon of scientists, policymakers, journalists, and storytellers alike’ (Science Fiction Studies, 2020: 323). In the same report, Gerry Canavan from Marquette University underlines how the virus of the pandemic has generated its own and unique vocabulary, constituting words and terms such as contactless, essential goods, essential workers, virtual learning, social distancing and economic impact payment which in turn generate unique debates and fault lines in terms of determining what is essential and what is not and the quantifiability of what constitutes desirable distance for social safety (Science Fiction Studies, 2020: 331–332). Through its vocabulary, the COVID-19 crisis has created a unique language of experience, embodiment and representation which in turn connects to certain shared markers and metaphors of memory and loss. This makes the memory of the pandemic – one which continues to form and re-form as new waves and strains of the virus appear and re-appear – infused with imagination and imaginative possibilities comparable to the discourses and descriptions in dystopian fiction. As Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay from University of Oslo argues in the report, science-fictional thinking during the crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic can offer ‘the chance to rebuild the narrative of solidarities for possible futures, seizing control from the closed futures of disaster capitalism’, producing in its wake a ‘solidarity across futurisms’ which Chattopadhyay classifies as ‘cofutures: complex, coeval, and most importantly, compossible’, defining compossibility as solidarity through ‘a recognition of difference’ (Science Fiction Studies, 2020: 339). The stylistics of science fiction – with its reliance on the literary tropes of mutating spatiotemporal structures through which the past, present and the future are telescoped together across subjects and objects, minds and machines – thus appears to have anticipated the lived realities of the COVID-19 world while also offering narrative devices through which the same may be re-membered, re-cognized and re-presented for the formation of connected cofutures.

Along with the new vocabulary and metaphors of memory produced by the COVID-19 crisis, it may be argued that the act and the spectacle of simultaneously and collectively performing social rituals together – assembling at certain hours of the day at balconies and terraces – appear to create a ‘new aesthetics of synchronicity as ‘social eurythmy’’ (Erll, 2020: 863) which, despite their sense of ‘global simultaneity’ (Erll, 2020: 863), do not necessarily produce solidarity as the COVID experience is often marked by access to privilege and the absence of the same. However, what emerges from the simultaneous experiencing and re-membering of the COVID-19 pandemic is how this crisis has revealed the ‘fractures in global systems that rely on greater atomization of labor, tremulously fragile supply-chain webs, and the precarity of life’ while also offering imaginative possibilities that trigger the need for ‘recognition of transnational connectivities of the disaster from which no one is protected’ (Science Fiction Studies, 2020: 340). Erll’s examination of COVID-19 memories offers a complex confluence of imagination, representation and remembrance, drawing on the Spanish flu as case study. Highlighting the absence of great works of art or literature dedicated to the Spanish flu, Erll (2020) extends this on to the argument that as ‘it was not a “pandemic imagined,” it did not turn into a “pandemic remembered”’ (p. 865). The insufficient imagination and re-membering of the Spanish flu also features in the work of Bert Hoffmann (2020) who argues how the COVID-19 crisis a century after the earlier pandemic

forcefully reminds us that awareness of the ecological context in which we humans operate does not stop at resource extractivism and rain forest destruction, climate change and micro-plastics, but that it also encompasses our uneasy co-existence with nature’s smallest beasts, the viruses, bacteria and germs that inhabit our world and our bodies. (p. 209)

The ecology of memory – especially that of a collectively experienced catastrophe – constitutes complex forms of forgetting along with re-membering through material markers and mediations. The memory ecology, as defined and theorized by Andrew Hoskins (2016), underlines a personal inward-looking as well as an expanded interconnected quality which espouses an emergent as well as a connective model of memory and remembering, invoking a ‘world of individuals and groups encountering and interacting with objects, interfaces and others, in a situated, ongoing and yet predisposed fashion’ (pp. 354–355). What emerges in such memory ecologies is the interconnectedness and the interplay of subjects and objects, agents and actants, in shaping and re-shaping re-membering across complex spatiotemporal conditions. This article examines the crisis chronotope as a complex experiential category for a pandemic like COVID-19, whereby the remapped experience of space and time may be cognitively negotiated with a trope that telescopes, describes and defamiliarizes complex spatiotemporal frames. The suspension in space and time marking the COVID-19 world – with the experience of being locked in closed spaces with an anxiety as well as anticipation of time – necessitates a telescoping of temporality mapped on to defamiliarized spatial experience which the crisis chronotope as a narrative and experiential category offers. This gets doubly foregrounded in the violent re-mappings of reality through ad hoc transformations of space and time, whereby public spaces suddenly turn to medical sites and social time gets suspended to a few hours of functioning frames.

Conclusion: crisis chronotope as remapped material site and bare life

The article will close with an examination of the emotionally unsettling examples of spatial remapping in the city of New Delhi, the capital of India, where the second wave of COVID-19 reached unimaginable proportions, with 3,86,452 COVID cases reported on 1 day (30 April 2021), the highest single-day increase in any country since the break of the pandemic (BBC News, 2021). This crisis pushed the medical and civic infrastructure of the otherwise robustly self-sufficient city to its most trying limits with a severe shortage of oxygen supplies and hospital beds. In what appears to be an extreme example of what we defined in this article as crisis chronotope, New Delhi experienced a grotesque reterritorialization of public space in ways which emplot the event and the memory of COVID-19 crisis through a shocking spectacle of struggle, human helplessness and death. While places of religious worship such as the Sikh gurdwaras were transformed into quasi-medical sites with makeshift beds and sporadic oxygen supplies in order to help COVID patients who failed to find places in overpopulated hospitals, makeshift spaces out of temporary pyre platforms fast became sites for final rituals for the dead as the ‘city’s morgues and crematoriums [were] overwhelmed by masses of Covid deaths’ (BBC News, 2021). The spectacle of spaces made ad hoc to accommodate the number of casualties even as ambulances waited with more dead bodies with token numbers emerged as an extreme instantiation of Giorgio Agamben’s notion of bare life (Agamben, 1998: 11), marked by an absolute absence of entitlements of all kinds, most chiefly that of oxygen, the first and most fundamental condition of planetary life. The second wave of COVID-19 had impacted India with unforeseeable speed and tragedy, with 4197 deaths due to Corona reported in the country on 7 May 2021 alone, the highest ever casualties in a single day (The Hindu, 2021). The capital city of New Delhi turned out be the worst-hit, with oxygen supplies and medical staff reaching their breaking points in resources and strength, the crisis compounded with the possibility of a deadlier third-wave subsequently (Mehta, 2021).

The crisis chronotope – whereby the living and the dead co-inhabit, queue up and contest for space through a thickening and corporealization of time – emerges as a disturbing pointer to an event constituted by defamiliarized matter which is also a metaphor, an experience which is also already a memory, publicly performed as well as privately suffered. The form of suffering here is mixed with fear, with the panic of possible infection interrupting the slow movement of memory that normally informs modes of mourning. Here again we see an event and an experience that compress space–time in a state of crisis that is ontologically and experientially inimical to memory and mourning of the normal human kind. Instead of the usual human mourners with visible human emotions, this space–time compression shows unrecognizable living and moving bodies in protective medical suits stand and watch dead bodies being burnt or buried in an intentionally accelerated pace, as more wait to bring more bodies in makeshift sites for the dead. The crisis chronotope shared by unrecognizable subjects in the hurriedly manufactured funeral and burial grounds here emerges as an extreme extension of what Marc Augé (1992) had defined as non-place, a liminal location that cannot be described as ‘relational, or historical, or concerned with identity’ (pp. 77–78). It also appears and performs as an ontological and experiential thanatoscape with ‘ambivalent alliances with humanity, artifice, and nature’ (Richter and Kluwick, 2015: 17) that is unmappable except as a compressed order of space–time where subjects and objects, the living and the dead, matter, memory and events mix in asymmetric entanglements. As in other instances worldwide of extreme contagion and casualties due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the case of New Delhi during the second wave exemplified an absolute re-ontologization of space and time, with the material markers of spatial boundaries and definitions quickly dissolving into a thanatoscape where matter – bio-essential as well as social – emerged most heavily and ironically through absence and lack of access. This also becomes a pointer to the broader question of boundaries in human life, which the COVID-19 pandemic has accentuated as well as dissolved worldwide with its compulsory conditions of isolation and social distance. Thus, while public parks are forced to become cemeteries overnight to accommodate the mounting number of deaths, private homes are often subjected to strong surveillance in order to monitor the movements of the infected.

The shared precarity and vulnerability of the COVID-19 pandemic flag up the philosophical distinction Dipesh Chakrabarty makes between the global and the planetary, sustainability and habitability (Chakrabarty, 2019) with the post-pandemic remapping of the Anthropocene and other orders of spatiotemporality. If sustainability as a human-centric approach involves ‘the welfare of the unborn’ in the planet (Chakrabarty, 2019: 18), habitability departs from the human-centric point of view and is instead concerned with ‘life, complex multicellular life, in general, and what makes that, not humans alone, sustainable’ (Chakrabarty, 2019: 20). This distinction is underlined dramatically by the matter and metaphor of oxygen during the COVID-19 pandemic, with the unavailability of oxygen emerging as a major medical marker of crisis which compromises human sustainability during this infection, despite the planetary presence of the element in the habitable order, one which started with ‘the great oxygenation of the atmosphere about 2.45 billion years ago’ (Chakrabarty, 2019: 25). The global nature of the COVID-19 pandemic ironically informs that we are perhaps entering an epoch where the ‘age of the global as such is over’ (Chakrabarty, 2019: 23), the global being defined by the great acceleration of capitalism and its consumption. Instead, our shared precarity against the pandemic – despite the difference of privilege that ensures agency and access – highlights the planetary as a ‘series of temporal force fields’ that ‘impinge upon each other and human life in numerous ways’, producing in their wake a combination that ‘poses existential issues today’ (Connolly, 2017: 4). In its re-orientations of intersubjective interactions as well as subject–object interfaces, the COVID-19 pandemic is a case of an entire space and an entire slice of historical time compressed in crisis, globally connected by the same contagion caused by a single viral attack that continues to grow and mutate, invading human bodies, manners of living, and the very ontology and experience of public and private life. This, we argue, is a crisis chronotope, one that forces a fragmentation of experience always already mixed with the awareness of its absence, connecting as well as disconnecting disparate subjects and objects, matter and metaphor through partial presences, across remapped re-cognitions, incomplete memories and un-certain minds, in a disruptive and defamiliarized slice of shared space and time.