Posts from the Pandemic

An Introduction

Bibliographic Data

ID7276140
AuthorsHank Scotch (corresponding author)
Year2020
Volume47
IssueS2
PagesS1-S3
Publication date2020-12-22
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueCritical Inquiry (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0093-1896 • E-ISSN: 1539-7858
PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1086/711423
OpenAlexW3114923261
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited7

Previous articleNext article FreePosts from the Pandemic: An IntroductionHank ScotchHank Scotch Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreAugust 2020The following collection of short essays, poems, and images was originally posted on the Critical Inquiry blog between March and June 2020. To preserve the posts, we are publishing them as a supplement to the Winter 2021 issue. They are ordered, as they were posted, chronologically. This, we hope, retains each piece’s fidelity to the moment and shows how reactions to the pandemic changed over a very long three months. Because many of the posts relied on information that was constantly in flux, what may have been a “fact” in a post one day was often not the next. As Lorraine Daston argues, we were—and in many cases still are—operating in the dark, within the limits of “ground-zero empiricism.”1 Instead of updating the posts to more accurately reflect our current knowledge about COVID-19, we are publishing them here, with a few small changes, as they first appeared on In the Moment.We started soliciting for the blog soon after our office closed in March. Knowing that many of our readers were at home social distancing, we wanted to provide free online content between the publication of our Spring and Summer issues. The first group of authors we asked to contribute were already in a relatively close orbit to the journal: we were preparing an essay by Slavoj Žižek for publication in a forthcoming issue; Wendy Chun was set to start teaching at the University of Chicago as the Critical Inquiry Visiting Professor; a piece by Bruno Latour on Carl Schmitt’s conception of space had just been accepted; and Catherine Malabou had recently delivered a lecture for us on Michel Foucault’s late work.Our solicitations were initially open-ended. What, if anything, we asked our first group of contributors, did they, or their work, have to say about the pandemic? As the series progressed, and our range of invitations expanded, our requests were often more specific. What did Daniele Lorenzini, coeditor of a past special issue, think about the use of Foucault in the earliest posts on the blog? What did Carolyn Adams, who wrote so compassionately about care in another issue, think about the dynamics of care for patients with COVID-19? What might a shaman do, we asked longtime contributor Michael Taussig, to help us deal with our current outbreak? But not all of the pieces here were solicited. Some arrived unexpectedly in our inboxes—often, but not always, from previous CI contributors.The speed with which we invited contributors and posted their work is just one example of how we adapted, like many of our readers and contributors, to the changing work demands presented by the pandemic. While so much of what we do at the journal was in limbo, we shifted our energies to the blog. We were often soliciting something from an author, receiving it days later, conferring with other members on the board about revisions, and then posting it in a relatively short period of time. That tempo enabled each piece to respond to the moment of its posting and to be in direct dialogue with one another. Within a week, for example, we went from Latour’s call for reflection, to Joshua Clover’s cry for direct action, followed by Lorenzini’s assessment of the rhetorical use of Foucault.2 Such an exchange might take months (even years) to play out across issues of CI. And with each new post (sometimes as many as four a week), our audience expanded. As of August 2020, “Posts from the Pandemic” has been viewed almost 250,000 times by visitors from all over the world.Foucault’s work is an obvious connecting thread in the series.3 Besides running through the posts by Latour, Clover, and Lorenzini, Foucault’s theories of biopolitics and governmentality link Malabou’s reflection on isolation in one of the earliest posts to Lennard Davis’s argument against the “war of survival” in the last.4 But it is Achille Mbembe’s call for a “universal right to breathe” in April, and the connection Romi Crawford makes between it and George Floyd’s final words as he was murdered by the police in May, that perhaps best captures the arc of the pandemic itself and the ways in which, between March and June, COVID-19 exposed and exacerbated inequalities rooted in systemic racism. “Caught in the stranglehold of injustice and inequality,” Mbembe writes, “much of humanity is threatened by a great chokehold as the sense that our world is in a state of reprieve spreads far and wide.”5 These words, already powerful when they were posted, have a different resonance in the world we are living in now.The world, the one that exists as I’m writing this introduction, is just as likely to change again as it did between, say, N. Katherine Hayles’s post about the “posthuman virus” in April to Robert Gooding-Williams’s post on “antiblack concepts” in June.6 By the time the supplement is published, the US may have a new president. Or it may not. That election, and so much more that is likely to unfold across the planet, will be intertwined with the global coronavirus pandemic. So of course this series is a provisional response to the pandemic. There will be more posts written about it on our blog, and many of CI’s articles will be organizing ideas around the effects of the pandemic for years to come. In the meantime, we present this supplement with the same spirit of accessibility as our blog, free and open to everyone to read. Thank you, readers and contributors, for continuing to make Critical Inquiry an important place for reflection and debate.7NotesI want to thank the editors of Critical Inquiry for making me the editor of this supplement, especially Tom Mitchell, Frances Ferguson, Bill Brown, and Patrick Jagoda. I also want to thank the contributors here who responded to my requests for pandemic content. I’m eternally grateful to their willingness and generosity to produce such thoughtful and often personal responses. To see the original posts, please visit critinq.wordpress.com/2020/04/28/posts-from-the-pandemic/1. See Lorraine Daston, “Ground-Zero Empiricism,” in “Posts from the Pandemic,” an online supplement to Critical Inquiry 47 (Winter 2021): S55–57.2. See Bruno Latour, “Is This a Dress Rehearsal,” in “Posts from the Pandemic,” pp. S25–27; Joshua Clover, “The Rise and Fall of Biopolitics: A Response to Bruno Latour,” in “Posts from the Pandemic,” pp. S28–32; and Daniele Lorenzini, “Biopolitics in the Time of Coronavirus,” in “Posts from the Pandemic,” pp. S40–45.3. There are also the connections to responses that were posted elsewhere. Giorgio Agamben’s developing response to the pandemic in Italy is cited throughout the series; see, for example, Giorgia Agamben, “Clarifications,” trans., Adam Kostko, “An und für sich,” 17 Mar. 2020, itself.blog/2020/03/17/giorgio-agamben-clarifications/4. Lennard Davis, “In the Time of Pandemic, the Deep Structure of Biopower Is Laid Bare,” in “Posts from the Pandemic,” p. S138. See also Catherine Malabou, “To Quarantine from Quarantine: Rousseau, Robinson Crusoe, and ‘I,’” in “Posts from the Pandemic,” pp. S13–16.5. Achille Mbembe, “The Universal Right to Breathe,” trans. Carolyn Shread, in “Posts from the Pandemic,” pp. S59, S59–60. See also Romi Crawford, “Connecting Breaths,” in “Posts from the Pandemic,” pp. S119–20.6. See N. Katherine Hayles, in “Posts from the Pandemic,” pp. S68–72, and Robert Gooding-Williams, “Revisiting the Ferguson Report: Antiblack Concepts and the Practice of Policing,” in “Posts from the Pandemic,” pp. S132–37.7. For a more critical assessment, posted midway through the series, see W. J. T. Mitchell’s “Groundhog Day and the Epoché,” in “Posts from the Pandemic,” pp. S95–99. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Critical Inquiry Volume 47, Number S2Winter 2021Posts from the PandemicEdited by Hank Scotch Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/711423 Views: 684 © 2021 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article

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