Epideictic Priming amid COVID-19: Metonymy under the Microscope

Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic and its constituent controversies illustrate how the epideictic motives of mutual imagination and “showing forth” contribute irrevocably to rhetorical motion. Imagistic representations of disease like the Center for Disease Control’s morphological depiction of the SARS-CoV-2 “spike protein” form illustrative metonyms that reduce or “essentialize” complex networks of sociomedical phenomena into tangible shorthand, priming audiences for deliberative action. Images of symptomatic suffering that characterize diseases like polio, measles, and the common cold viscerally orient audiences to bodily suffering, compelling the sort of imaginative, deliberative vision that Aristotle terms phantasia. The spike protein obfuscates human suffering by substituting the euphemistically ineffable realm of microbiology. Journalists and medical communicators, therefore, bear an uncomfortable ethical imperative to represent metonymic suffering, not for its sensationalism or shock value, but for its epideictic capacity to prime or “turn” audiences toward meaningful deliberative action in support of real human well-being.