Pub Date : 2023-08-01DOI: 10.1177/07255136231188180
P. Wagner
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.
{"title":"The lasting significance of viruses: COVID-19, historical moments and social transformations","authors":"P. Wagner","doi":"10.1177/07255136231188180","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07255136231188180","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":54188,"journal":{"name":"Thesis Eleven","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43579323","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-01DOI: 10.1177/07255136231195110
Alex Oelofse
Cape Town is a city of astonishing beauty and contradiction. It is tough, beautiful, relaxed and edgy in different proportions. Or at least, these are some of the impressions it might give to outsiders. Nestled in that wonderful vista of Lion’s Head and Table Mountain, stretching from surf to mountain scarp, it still combines the architecture of mixed modernity, from the Company Gardens to downtown marinas and mirror glass. If your trail takes you to Stellenbosch, as ours did when we lived nearby, you drive through/past Khayelitsha, the informal housing that stretches for miles of tin, PVC and satellite dishes, and shebeens across the flatlands by the airport. A little further out there is the dormitory beach suburb of Strand and the dramatically segregated features of Somerset West, black one side of the freeway, white the other. As Ivan Vladislavić and others have observed, the history of place in this place can be read from its concrete divisions, Architecture After Apartheid and then post-apartheid. As Alex Oelofse shows in these remarkable photos, the natural beauty and colonial legacy is now framed from a height by the concrete grid first imposed by the apartheid state, and that which follows. Cape Town is a mobile city; walking, driving for those lucky enough to take safety in the refuge of their wheeled metal capsules, riding more perilously hanging on the back of a truck for the black urban poor, or pushing bicycles; the city thrives on activity. In these stills it is in fact still; the absence of actors, however defined and marked, is gobsmacking. The state-sanctioned lockdown confined the population indoors, or into hiding, living the radical diversity of lives that they otherwise would, in Cape Town, in isolation or proximity, falling ill and dying differentially. The god’s eye view by drone of this austere beauty leaves us wondering, in awe, of how life goes on the ground, and when it might return to its own version of normal. The concrete desire lines viewed from above make us long for the energy and pulse that run along the ground. We are grateful to Alex for his work, and for sharing it with us and our readers.
{"title":"Photography – Empty desire lines: Cape Town under lockdown","authors":"Alex Oelofse","doi":"10.1177/07255136231195110","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07255136231195110","url":null,"abstract":"Cape Town is a city of astonishing beauty and contradiction. It is tough, beautiful, relaxed and edgy in different proportions. Or at least, these are some of the impressions it might give to outsiders. Nestled in that wonderful vista of Lion’s Head and Table Mountain, stretching from surf to mountain scarp, it still combines the architecture of mixed modernity, from the Company Gardens to downtown marinas and mirror glass. If your trail takes you to Stellenbosch, as ours did when we lived nearby, you drive through/past Khayelitsha, the informal housing that stretches for miles of tin, PVC and satellite dishes, and shebeens across the flatlands by the airport. A little further out there is the dormitory beach suburb of Strand and the dramatically segregated features of Somerset West, black one side of the freeway, white the other. As Ivan Vladislavić and others have observed, the history of place in this place can be read from its concrete divisions, Architecture After Apartheid and then post-apartheid. As Alex Oelofse shows in these remarkable photos, the natural beauty and colonial legacy is now framed from a height by the concrete grid first imposed by the apartheid state, and that which follows. Cape Town is a mobile city; walking, driving for those lucky enough to take safety in the refuge of their wheeled metal capsules, riding more perilously hanging on the back of a truck for the black urban poor, or pushing bicycles; the city thrives on activity. In these stills it is in fact still; the absence of actors, however defined and marked, is gobsmacking. The state-sanctioned lockdown confined the population indoors, or into hiding, living the radical diversity of lives that they otherwise would, in Cape Town, in isolation or proximity, falling ill and dying differentially. The god’s eye view by drone of this austere beauty leaves us wondering, in awe, of how life goes on the ground, and when it might return to its own version of normal. The concrete desire lines viewed from above make us long for the energy and pulse that run along the ground. We are grateful to Alex for his work, and for sharing it with us and our readers.","PeriodicalId":54188,"journal":{"name":"Thesis Eleven","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41940019","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-01DOI: 10.1177/07255136231188170
Timothy Andrews
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.
{"title":"Between the acts: At home in uncertain times","authors":"Timothy Andrews","doi":"10.1177/07255136231188170","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07255136231188170","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":54188,"journal":{"name":"Thesis Eleven","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47525099","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-01DOI: 10.1177/07255136231186643
Howard Prosser
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.
{"title":"A void like the plague: Fragments of domestic theory","authors":"Howard Prosser","doi":"10.1177/07255136231186643","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07255136231186643","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":54188,"journal":{"name":"Thesis Eleven","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44834327","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-01DOI: 10.1177/07255136231195139
Eric Ferris
{"title":"Book review: Capitalism versus Democracy? Rethinking Politics in the Age of Environmental Crisis","authors":"Eric Ferris","doi":"10.1177/07255136231195139","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07255136231195139","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":54188,"journal":{"name":"Thesis Eleven","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41922491","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-01DOI: 10.1177/07255136231194795
Peter Beilharz, Sian Supski
{"title":"Introduction to COVID special issue","authors":"Peter Beilharz, Sian Supski","doi":"10.1177/07255136231194795","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07255136231194795","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":54188,"journal":{"name":"Thesis Eleven","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48502273","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-01DOI: 10.1177/07255136231186661
Sian Supski
{"title":"Watching the crown: Tangible uncertainty. A photographic essay of Melbourne in the time of the novel coronavirus","authors":"Sian Supski","doi":"10.1177/07255136231186661","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07255136231186661","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":54188,"journal":{"name":"Thesis Eleven","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43342211","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-07-24DOI: 10.1177/07255136231188186
M. Warin, Natali Valdez
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.
{"title":"#My(white)BodyMyChoice","authors":"M. Warin, Natali Valdez","doi":"10.1177/07255136231188186","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07255136231188186","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":54188,"journal":{"name":"Thesis Eleven","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-07-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46998059","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-07-17DOI: 10.1177/07255136231188178
C. S. Veric
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.
{"title":"Praying in the pandemic, and after","authors":"C. S. Veric","doi":"10.1177/07255136231188178","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07255136231188178","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":54188,"journal":{"name":"Thesis Eleven","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-07-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46944455","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-07-17DOI: 10.1177/07255136231188176
G. Therborn
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.
{"title":"The pandemic experience and the post-pandemic world prospects","authors":"G. Therborn","doi":"10.1177/07255136231188176","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07255136231188176","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":54188,"journal":{"name":"Thesis Eleven","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-07-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47733578","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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