Lies in the Time of COVID

The starting point of this essay is the proposition that the networks of connections which make the current way of life possible become particularly visible in times of crisis, or that crises offer a unique lens for studying the fundamental features of the societies we live in. The basic premise of this essay is that the function of culture is interpretative and that culture can be seen as the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves in order to cope with the “observational chaos” we are surrounded with. The goal of the essay is to illuminate, prove (in this phasis of research, disproving is impossible) or lay the “foundation” of the viewpoint (socioepisteomlogial grounding) that the ongoing crisis caused by the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has laid bare the general epistemological disorientation that marks the culture of post-truth characteristic of the early decades of the twenty-first century, the culture that constitutes a global context in which the pandemic is taking place.

In March 2020 the Australian government announced that two cases of community transmission of a novel coronavirus had been detected in the country. In response, the government implemented movement and containment measures which were publicly justified by the warning that the infectious disease COVID-19 was a serious health threat. In the month of March 2020 the Australian way of life was drastically and swiftly transformed as a result of the government's actions. The lived experience of events can be unpacked through diarised entries and media analysis using the perspective of Foucauldian governmentality concepts and social constructionist theory. This illustrates the ways in which the population was incrementally managed and directed with the goal of keeping cases of COVID-19 to a minimum until a vaccine was deployed to keep the population safe from the virus threat. The justifications used by the government to implement controls are questionable because at the time COVID-19 presented as a mild illness in approximately 80% of cases and was found to predominantly adversely affect the elderly, the majority of whom were in aged care facilities. This article offers a critical analysis of the government directives, and justifications used to coerce the population to comply with measures taken to control them.

Feminist dissent, 2022

This paper seeks to open a discussion about the role played by the extreme right within the contemporary 'anti-vaxxer' movement as it has developed during the recent Covid-19 pandemic. While supporters of this movement are politically diverse, we see the far right as having used the Covid crisis as a significant opportunity to place their conspiratorial narrative before a wider audience, where a rhetoric of victimisation around pandemic related restrictions masks their deep authoritarianism and profound racism and misogyny. We discuss 'white replacement' theory as the key idea animating the contemporary far right, in both its secular and religious manifestations, and we argue that this theory has offered the framework for the far right's opposition to vaccinations and public health related restrictions. Throughout the pandemic, the far right's use of conspiracy theory and calculated disinformationparticularly online-has thrown up considerable dilemmas in relation to issues of freedom of speech for progressives. We conclude by discussing how the feminist anti-racist left must continue to defend freedom of speech in the face of this, but this understanding needs to be informed by a conception of the 'common good'.

OMICS: A Journal of Integrative Biology

We are currently facing and traversing in the thick of a twin pandemic: coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and disinformation. Disinformation is false information created and spread deliberately with the intention to mislead public opinion, obscure truths, and undermine trust in knowledge. The digital age we live in is quite different than the printing revolution and invention of the oil-based ink printing press centuries ago. Digital technologies can spread and repeat disinformation at extremely high speeds, while anyone, a qualified expert or not, and with internet access, can become an author. To fight disinformation, we ought to dismantle the entrenched and extractive epistemologies that act as upstream drivers and sites of disinformation production. Epistemology refers to the value-laden knowledge frames, overarching master narratives, and storylines, in which knowledge is produced. If the epistemologies in which we generate knowledge are false, then the knowledge products will be laden with disinformation. Moreover, the harms caused by disinformation can extend well beyond the immediate knowledge domain where disinformation has originated. This occurs when ''false equivalence'' is used as a form of rhetoric. False equivalence is a type of flawed sense making where equal weight is given to arguments with concrete material evidence, and those that are conjecture, untrue, or unjust. This article presents an analysis of the disinformation pandemic attendant to COVID-19, with an eye to its causes-of-causes: unchecked extractive epistemologies (e.g., technocracy), and the practice of false equivalence in pandemic discourses. We argue that holding the political agency of master narratives to account is essential (1) to fight the disinformation pandemic and (2) for prefigurative politics to build egalitarian and democratic societies in place of the instrumental/transactional relationships that typify the contemporary nation states and the neoliberal university whose ossified rituals lack the normative capacities for critical governance in a time of converging social, digital, and ecological crises. For liberation from disinformation, we should start with liberation from entrenched extractive epistemologies in science and society.

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 2023

In this paper, we analyse the particular phenomena of COVID-19 pandemic shaming. We examine Sartre's account of the undifferentiated other in the experience of 'the look', and his insistence on shame as a foundational relational affect, in order to give a robust theoretical frame to understand how pandemic shaming circulated both online and offline, in targeted and diffuse manners. We focus on two features of pandemic shaming. First, we draw attention to the structural necessity of an audience in acts of pandemic shaming, where the shamer acts on behalf of a community of others, the audience, to perform and enforce a set of standards, values or norms. We turn to the we-experience and collective emotions literature and discuss how the shamer believes themselves to be 'speaking' on behalf of a community who share their outrage along with their values. Second, we discuss how the presumption of a collective emotion was frequently mistaken in acts of pandemic shaming, where shaming frequently led to shame backlashes, where the audience revealed themselves not to share the emotion and values of the shamer, consequently shaming the shamer. We argue that Jean-Paul Sartre's voyeur example is usefully illustrative of the tripartite structure of (1) shamed, (2) shamer and (3) shamer of the shamer that occurs in iterative processes of pandemic shaming, which are accompanied by shaming backlashes. We conclude by reflecting on the socio-historical context for Sartre's accounts of shame and 'the look', namely the German occupation of Paris and Sartre's experience of the French Resistance movement, and how these yield a particular socio-historical framing that makes evident how the extraordinary pseudo-wartime conditions of COVID-19 rendered atmospheres of distrust and suspicion prevalent.

Quarterly Journal of Speech, 2023

Planet Lockdown, a documentary film, claims that the COVID-19 pandemic was manufactured by finance capitalists, Silicon Valley, and the pharmaceutical industry to microchip the population, consolidate global wealth, and enslave the population. Viral videos from the film have received tens of millions of engagements throughout social networks and media, constituting a major source of COVID-19 disinformation. This article argues that COVID-19 enslavement fantasies consummate white conservative fears of racial displacement, brought on by an impending demographic shift and greater visibility of antiracist activism throughout the early stages of the pandemic. I argue that Planet Lockdown’s preoccupation with so-called “modern slavery” restages a national primal scene to resecure white power as perceptions of its dominance wanes: a fantasy of the origins of the liberal subject that omits that subject’s relationship to slavery and anti-Blackness. By imagining slavery as a future threat to white selfhood rather than the structural organization of a society underwritten by anti-Blackness, COVID-19 conspiracy rhetoric facilitates a disavowal of the structural legacy of white supremacy.

Rethinking Marxism, 1999

The argument of this paper is that the indeterminacy of Derridean 'justice' is precisely what lends deconstruction its peculiar moral force. Those who understand deconstruction as no more than an indeterminate indecisionism are therefore missing a crucial feature of the Derridean project. These readers, I propose, falsely collapse the conditions and the consequences of ethical-political decision. From this point of view, Derrida's Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International may be understood as neither more nor less directly political than those of Derrida's works which do not directly address Marxism. My conclusion is that the deconstructive practice of exposing différance at the heart of any presence is integral to Derrida's on-going project of political contestation and, further, is directly germane to the theorization of Marxist politics.

FOUCAULT STUDIES, 2024

Since 2016, the rise of post-truth politics has created a situation of democratic discontent in the west. While many scholars tend to regard post-truth politics as a threat to democratic order, I would like to propose that what we have been witnessing in this form of politics has been the transformation of the democratic ethos. By turning to Michel Foucault’s lecture on the true life of Diogenes of Sinope, delivered at College De France in 1984, I ascertain the framework for demonstrating how we can approach a new shape of democratic ethos in our era of post-truth politics. I argue that in Diogenes’s true life, Foucault saw the concrete life, which, by emphasizing the material conditions of all human bodies, could liberate each individual from the constraints of their conventional lives. Diogenes’s life could then be a form of self-emancipation since it not only showed how untrue the conventional life was but also released each individual from any conventions estranged from them. Relying on this point, I propose the notion of untruth as the new ground of our democratic lives. Though post-truth politics destroys the objective form of truth, the untruth—as its main element—can play a leading role in grounding our democratic ethos to the extent that it asserts our capability of self-emancipation.

Romani Chronicles of COVID-19, 2023

Abstract - Denial of Danger: COVID-19, Disinformation, and When to Burst our Bubbles Gwendolyn Albert This is a first-person account of changes the author observed in the civil society circles with whom she is familiar in the Czech Republic during the COVID-19 pandemic, including members of the Romani minority and their non-Romani allies. The author describes her experience of shock as those around her denied and downplayed the existence and importance of the pandemic and how her positionality as a foreign national able to access media in more than one language framed her reading of decisions made by governments in the region. Key words: COVID-19, Czech Republic, disinformation, media bubbles, Roma, Slovakia

European Journal of Transformation Studies, 2020

In this essay I examine the importance of truth in society and public life. I adopt the Polish perspective, which, however, can also be considered in universal terms. Polish experiences are a kind of exemplification here, which I refer to quite briefly so as not to obscure the main theme, which is the moral dimension of truth in social and public life. The pandemic, in turn, acts as a lens in which the phenomena related to the exercise of power by populists and the flood of false information focus. Paradoxically, it also creates an opportunity to overcome the structures of lies and falsehoods. However, the future of truth in the post-pandemic world will not depend on random forces, but on a collective effort made to search for it, and on shaping the right attitudes and strengthening the institutional order that will foster freedom which is a necessary condition for truth.