LIFE DURING PANDEMIC: An uncertain happening

 

When we presented the early 2020 issue of the European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, no one comprehended what the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, in Wuhan province, China, would mean to the world, to Europe, to any country or any single person in the weeks to come. A couple of months later, life as we knew it fundamentally changed. The mantras of today are ‘stay at home, stay safe’ and ‘social distancing’. Not even the most critical mind working on surveillance – and on what George Orwell grasped in his ‘1984’ novel – would have imagined that almost all over the world, nation states ban individual free movement and the gathering of people, while borders are closed and aeroplanes are grounded. Normal social life and work has come to a halt. It seems the policing of populations might be the ‘only’ way to stop the deadly virus spreading further–or at least slow it down to a pace our medical systems can handle. Ulrich Beck’s ‘risk society’ appears to be taking on new forms in current times, while Simmel’s ‘psychology of the city dweller’ also seems to take on novel meaning. The effects of the pandemic on social inequality, urban life, citizenship, migration, and core-periphery relations are already becoming visible, but will be only fully comprehensible in due course. What we have to face up to is unprecedented as far as contemporary generations are concerned, and will leave heavy marks, stigma, and perhaps trauma for those who survive the virus (but also for the lucky ones who are not being physically infected). 

There is a lot to say on the neo-nationalisation of security regimes we see right now, as well as on systematic failures of national and international politics in securing public health systems, which now renders visible the horrific scale of death counting. Neoliberal capitalism has ignored what society means, and now leaves it to the kinder people in society to fill the care gaps that are man- and system-made. The disaster is televised, and in the daily news, we increasingly see worn out faces of nurses, doctors, and of all involved with keeping alive the livelihood in our neighbourhoods, cities and across the globe. Foremost, the rising numbers of mass deaths as result of the COVID-19 pandemic is streamed into our temporarily (over-)crowded home spaces, and is reversing the notion of public social life and culture. Empty city streets, closed businesses, and people avoiding proximity of each other is a bleak reminder that our urbanist mode of living is fragile, and that everything does not come back to life during springtime. We can only hope that April is the cruellest of months.

The ‘state of emergency’ not only affects the physical and psychological health of populations all over Europe, and the world, but it equally affects the political rights and democratic status of citizens. The case of Hungary is the most explicit one (as far as Europe is concerned) in that it is not merely temporarily interrupting, but fully dismantling, its democratic regime, by granting unlimited powers to its prime minister, Viktor Orbán, and for an indefinite time period. Various European Union member states are now mobilising against the rise of this authoritarian system within the EU, but the current reaction seems to arrive too late, as the process has been long underway, and the COVID-19 crisis has provided the Hungarian regime with the perfect context to take their ‘illiberal’ project one step further.

Geopolitically, relations appear to be changing. At the time of writing, China has sent equipment to Italy, and both Cuban and Russian doctors have flown in to support the crumbling health provisions in Europe. Did someone say European Union? Again, the EU has been slow in its reaction, not least vis-à-vis the robust propaganda machines of Moscow and Beijing, and EU member states have reproduced cleavages in their reactions that had already emerged in the 2008 financial and economic crisis – that is, between the wealthy North and economically fragile South. We might have to reconsider the notion of European solidarity, cosmopolitanism and global humanity in the years to come.

One significant consequence that cultural and political sociologists ought to consider carefully is that both the health and social implications (calling for national and European unity and solidarity), and the democratic ones (demanding political reasonability), indicate a return of the political – that is, the existence, centrality, and survival of the political community, as Marcel Gauchet (2020) has recently recalled. Similarly, developments constitute a return of society and of a collective awareness of the significance of society and of the collectivity.

It is difficult to go back to our routine of scheduled articles we have prepared for this issue. However, ‘the show must go on’. Therefore, in the following sections, we introduce the different articles assembled for this issue, which unintendedly matter in helping us to understand some of the elements of the current crisis, in terms of, for instance, the boundary drawing between communities in times of peace and war (Mizrachi & Weiss), the role of public events in offering social inclusion (which currently might be internet and online-devised cultural events) (Citroni), or the cohesiveness (or not) of Higher Education systems according to the European framework of Bologna (Diogo).

The production of knowledge, or in the context of the Bologna process, ‘knowledge society’, has become a prism through which to watch how different national Higher Education systems across Europe cope with the transformation from predominantly agricultural or post-industrial societies, to what is deemed a high-tech knowledge society. In her paper, ‘Looking back in anger? Putting in perspective the implementation of the Bologna process in Finnish and Portuguese higher education systems’, Sara Diogo follows up the implementation of the Bologna process in two countries. A reminder: the Bologna process is an incentive to make European HE competitive and more efficient (‘neo-liberal modernisation’), in these harmonising, distinctive HE systems, as well as pushing forward European integration – what experts call ‘policy diffusion’. As the Bologna process is about normative orientation, it leaves space to local – not only national – institutions, to accept and implement educational guidelines, for example, ‘good practices’ developed in other jurisdictions.

In Portugal, the implementation of new standards meant for example ‘a transition from a traditional teaching paradigm to a student learning paradigm’ (Diogo). The notion of local culture is relevant here, as in both countries implementation and communication processes differed significantly. As Diogo argues, embedded in the different organisation of national societies and of HE, the implementation in Portugal was enacted as a top-down process with a stark rift between ‘academic time and political time’ (Diogo), while in Finland it has unfolded more smoothly due to a more cooperative tradition. In both cases, the European agenda was tailored to the national needs and efforts of local traditions.

However, what is interesting beyond the actual findings of the study, and presented in the paper, is that the economic crisis of 2008 was a game changer in the different nation states, here Finland and Portugal, adding more financial pressure on HE systems, and making it the rationale of the day to commercialise education even further.

Whereas ‘culture’ is linked to two national higher education sectors in Diogos’ contribution, in the next article by Sebastiano Citroni, ‘Civil Society Events: Ambiguities and the Exertion Cultural Power’, the focus is on the role public cultural events play in strengthening social inclusion, and enhancing participation of disadvantaged groups in the city of Milan.

In the current lockdown of public spaces across the globe due to the spread of COVID-19, and here foremost in Milan, the notion of ‘participatory events’ gains new meanings. In commercialised cultures, the amount of money at one’s disposal defines one’s opportunities to participate. This is equally true now that participation in social life has gone digital. It is technical equipment (for example, tablets and computers) as well as the ‘know-how’ regarding different communication tools (such as Skype, Team, Zoom, or Whatsapp) that define access and participation. But a time will come when this pandemic is over, when we can go back to the streets, to have events without fear of contagion.

In his paper, Citroni shows that ‘civil society events’, such as festivals, act as effective weapons of cultural power, inviting participation in the name of the common good. These events also have a political nature: the organisers always shape the meanings and goals of these happenings. For the organisations that are responsible for these civil society events, these goals are worth aiming for, even if the events themselves are not always considered a success. These events allow organisations to promote their goals through inclusivity and good times, rather than through negative campaigning. What these organisations try to achieve is a balance between the spectacular and the participatory. Without the spectacle, there is no event. And without the participation, a festival is just a festival, not a means of symbolic power.

This is of course also true of our efforts at creating online communities during the times of lockdowns and advancing pandemics: we try to keep a community alive with the tools that we have, and the way that we end up doing it has political implications. Online communities sustained by synchronous video calls tend to have clear-cut borders and less possibilities for spontaneous encounters. We have seen the birth of many online communities for neighbourhood solidarity and such, but we are yet to see if they can be sustained.

In the final article, ‘“We do not want to assimilate!”: Rethinking the role of group boundaries in peace initiatives between Muslims and Jews in Israel and in the West Bank’, Nissim Mizrachi and Erica Weiss also investigate communities and their boundaries. Their paper rethinks group boundaries in the peace processes between Muslims and Jews in Israel and the West Bank.

The central argument of the paper is that religious (even conservative or orthodox) communities of Jews and Muslims might have better tools for managing living together than more liberal communities. This defies the notion that the more conservative religious groups are further away from each other: because of similar conservative gender roles, and a similarly central role of religion in their communities, they are able to meet on the same level, and to extend warmer, familiar ties across group boundaries. These groups can share their opposition to secular liberalism, whereas peace groups built on the grounds of secular liberalism have a harder time negotiating the policed and unequal realities of Israel and the West Bank. The argument is that the cultural resources of these conservative religious groups give grounds for mutual understanding amongst similarly conservative religious group, despite the theological differences. Social borders are shared, respected and understood, and the opposition to what is seen as the liberal way of life can bring these groups together.

We devote substantial space to the review of books in our Journal as we hold in high esteem the expertise of those colleagues discussing topics more in-depth. We begin this section with Jonathan Catlin’s review essay of Lars Rensmann’s book ‘The politics of unreason: the Frankfurt School and the origins of antisemitism’. Catlin reads Rensmann’s analysis in concordance with two original contributions by Frankfurt School intellectuals, ‘The Authoritarian Personality’, published originally in 1950, and ‘Aspekte des neuen Rechtsradikalismus’, a university lecture Adorno held in Vienna in 1967, which has recently been published. Catlin follows Rensmann’s argument while also discussing the links between historical empirical studies of the ‘F-Scale’ (the scale of fascist orientations), the controversial positions of different members of the Frankfurt School, and approaching the question of which lessons we can learn to understand contemporary threats by far-right ideology, contemporary antisemitism, as well as racisms. Catlin’s detailed review also engages with the controversy between different ideological and disciplinary positions of the Frankfurt School, stressing that Adorno ‘saw antisemitism as a historically specific effect of the alienated class society’, and posing the capitalism question.

Next, in the book review section, we publish Jaanika Puusalo’s review of ‘Antisocial media: how Facebook disconnects us and undermines democracy’, by Siva Vaidhyanathan. The book problematises the role of social media as handy virtual platforms for communication, after all reminding us of the commercial idea behind it. Facebook epitomises all of what social media means when taking into account its recent involvement with political party communication and the upfront manipulation of voters. Puusalo mentions the eight aspects of Facebook as ‘machine’, distinguished by Vaidhyanathan, for example, its function as ‘a pleasure machine, but also as a surveillance machine’.

Thinking of our current dependency on different social media platforms to continue our access to social communication in a time of ‘lockdown’ and ‘social distancing’, we should not forget that social media platforms such as Facebook are selling and gathering data. Thus, the lack of physical social interaction with family and friends, and our increased use of Facebook and Twitter, might be a haven for commercial (and political) information gathering right now.

The book review section concludes with Tania Saeed’s review of ‘Veiling in Fashion. Space and Hijab in minority communities’ by Anna-Mari Almila. Though the ‘male gaze’ linked to the public sphere seems to be temporarily suspended due to the international lockdown of public spaces, the aesthetic, ideological and perhaps ethical public controversies on veiling stay with us. Whereas Almila’s book uses material from interviews with 48 women in Finland, Saeed values the contribution the book makes to international knowledge on the variety of choices in adopting the veil, as well as styles chosen by individual women, in order to visualise belonging to Muslim communities.