Notes on corona crisis and temporality

Abstract

The coronavirus crisis has put the discussion of the notion of crisis itself back at the center of the debate. The concept of crisis is derived from the Greek verb krino that means to "separate," "choose," "judge," or "decide," As Koselleck (1988, 2012) has explained its different meanings in ancient Greece, all somehow suggested the absence of time and a moment of truth and decision-its medical Hippocratic meaning being the one that historically prevailed, referring to the critical moment when illness could get worse and lead to death or could ease off and lead to recovery. Crisis was, in that sense, a turning point with opposing possible outcomes. A crisis marks a milestone in a society's trajectory, whose depth is proportional to the crisis itself. Returning to the original meaning of the term is useful to take into account that every crisis is settled by a process of reorganization of social (and geopolitical) relations, whose concrete outcome depends on the balance of forces between the different sociopolitical projects at stake. That is the crucial question regarding the debates on the world after the pandemic. In its contemporary conventional uses in politics and social sciences, crisis no longer refers to this turning point towards different dénouements, but rather a moment when a given situation worsens. Crisis thus merely describes the opposite pathological state to the normal. But the fact is that the normality of capitalism is already pathological, first because it regularly leads to crises and second because it creates everyday suffering and inequality. Walter Benjamin (1999[1927-1940]:473, [N9a,1]) in his Passagenwerk noted this everyday twosided pathological normality of capitalism when writing that "the concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are 'status quo' is the catastrophe. It is not an ever-present possibility but what in each case is given. Thus Strindberg (in 10 Damascus?): 'hell is not something that awaits us, but this life here and now'." The topological figure of bifurcation is critical to understand the historic meaning of crises as they represent a turning point towards the uncertain where alternative paths become possible. Several authors have recently made use of the concept to explain the dilemmas of global capitalism in terms of competing future possibilities. The cases of Wallerstein, Balibar, and Bensaïd are noteworthy. All of them rest upon certain usages of mathematics bifurcation theory associated to catastrophe theory, whose main exponent was mathematician René Thom

Synchronization of the Corona Crisis

“…The Corona Crisis is precisely the sort of totalizing concept that synchronizes diverse experiences into a globalized, temporal regime (cf. Antentas, 2020; Lorenzini, 2021), and in that very move obscures the social differences and structural inequalities that underpin the crisis (Opratko et al, 2021; Peckham, 2020). But synchronization is never fully completed as a singular process.…”

‘The time is out of joint’: temporality, COVID-19 and graphic medicine

“…The COVID-19 pandemic was first identified in the Chinese city of Wuhan in December 2019, and it rapidly spread around the world to create a state of emergency. For many, it has engendered a reality where ‘simultaneous perception of living in an unknown moment and a foretold catastrophe has been coupled’ ( Antentas 2020, 3 ). Given such unprecedented disruption, it is not surprising that it elicited a diverse range of philosophical and literary responses.…”

“…The quintessential surrealist temporality and the queerness of time are made possible by temporal acceleration and stagnation. As such, the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrates that ‘every crisis is a moment of temporal unification and simplification, of condensation, and of social contradictions’ ( Antentas 2020, 3 ). If the monotony of routine life precipitates an alternate experience of time as static, then the sameness that spans days, weeks, months and years has induced a sense of acceleration.…”

“…Within such a framework, man’s existence is based and measured on what he was in the past, how he has changed in the present and how he will evolve in the future. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has modified ‘the nature of presentism, since our extended and endless present has been abruptly invaded both by the past (the confinement and the virus evoke[s] situations that we associate with the great pandemics of the past) and by the future (which suddenly appears in the form of an abyss and a catastrophe to come)’ ( Antentas 2020, 2 ). Consequently, the loss of intrinsic referentiality has transformed human beings into temporal refugees .…”

Conjunctions of resilience and the Covid-19 crisis of the creative cultural industries

“…Understood in this way as social construction and conjunction, crises ‘are moments of simplification of social relations and clarification of reality. They reveal the hidden which we usually do not see’ ( Antentas, 2020 : 316).…”