Thesis Eleven

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.