The normality/emergency imaginary, contingency and political possibility: Analysing the UK pandemic response

Abstract

The outside of normality and normal politics is commonly referred to as emergencies, crises and disasters. The paper describes and analyses this normality/emergency imaginary by relating it to questions about order, necessity and contingency. The paper draws upon Sergei Prozorov's work on order and its excess to examine the shift in the United Kingdom pandemic response from recommendations to mandates and regulations in late March 2020. It is argued that the normality/emergency imaginary transposes the more general problem of necessity and contingency into a less complex one, thus providing a solution to questions of order, but that this displaces and eludes the important questions of contingency as a precondition for politics. Specifically, it reduces questions of order and contingency to a choice between normality or emergency where normality is rendered just and emergency measures come to be seen as necessary and un-political. Indeed, the normality/emergency imaginary, and in particular the assumption that it is analogous to the order/contingency problem, makes it difficult to mount a political critique of emergency measures that does not reproduce and reaffirm the problem that motivates it.