Going viral: chronotopes of disaster in film and media

Abstract

Modern Western thought has always had a propensity for crisis narratives. The anticipation (or self-fulfilment) of an abrupt breakthrough that leads to a paradigm shift in various domains of human experience has defined a broad spectrum of disciplines, discourses, and practices, which are based on the idea of linear progress and the necessity of a fundamental breach between the past and the present. The use of the crisis metaphor, with its medical rather than theological origins, has from the late seventeenth century forward been used to diagnose states of emergency, degeneration, and vanishment. It has gradually established itself as an “expression of a new sense of time which both indicated and intensified the end of an epoch” (Koselleck 2006, 358). The global outburst of Covid-19 in early 2020 more than strengthened the association of the biological with the political body. The outbreak also highlighted the need for humanities scholars to be vigilant and to sharpen existing hermeneutical tools in readings of an unprecedented phenomenon and related public interventions. More importantly, the emergence of Covid-19 has fostered a discussion of emergent subjectivities, which are newly imagined, while highlighting the relationship between the fragile and ephemeral and the time-sensitive and exigent. We take as a premise that a specific temporality unravelled during the pandemic crisis period. This period spans from late 2019, when the first news coverage of the virus in Wuhan, China, circulated throughout international media, to the spring of 2022, when most countries around the world lifted their coronavirus-related health measures, thus inaugurating the recovery phase. During this period, we detect a dynamic, dialectical understanding of time. On the one hand, during the early days of the pandemic, dominant discourse centred on the theme of the hiatus, the gap, the rapture of everyday normalcy, prompting people to examine the current moment through the comparison to radically different ways of being. On the other hand, and towards the latter part of the pandemic, the dominant message concerned the endorsement of an accelerated culture, constantly evolving through technological