Keynote Address (“The Covid Normal”)

Abstract

“The Covid Normal” indicates both, how Covid-19 has been normalized and how the normal, as we have understood it, has been affected by Covid-19. In this talk, I outline some of the features of this Covid normal. In section I, “The Health of Others, Information-distrust, and Cold Panic”, I argue that it is now assumed that safety is everyone’s concern, and we are to take decisions for the greater common good. We are, in the pandemic, even more of informationsubjects, our subjectivity – of which social and moral responsibility is a constituent – than before, forged in the crucible of information, and yet we find it difficult to act responsibly on the basis of information received because there is no normative ‘truth’ about Covid that we can agree on. I propose that the panic is not from Covid-19, it arises from contradictory data. In section II, “Disease, Democracy and Discrete Tragedies”, I propose that the mystery that haunts the Covidian state is generated through disinformation and noninformation. Covid 19 is not a historical disaster: it is a set of discrete tragedies (migrants, the urban poor, older people, differently-abled) of small segments of the populations that never cohered into a national subjecthood or victimhood in the ecosystem of misinformation. In section III, “The New Visual Icon”, I forward some meanings of being masked.