Description
The Covid-19 pandemic testifies to the exhaustion of the binary distinction between the exception and the everyday. By generalising an experience of ‘crisis ordinariness’ (Berlant 2011) it provides a space that evokes new imaginaries of crisis, both through public problematisations of being-in a stretched emergency and the simultaneous governmental attempts to enclose these experiences. In this paper we turn to care, not only as an omnipresent condition of the human (Gilligan 1993), but as a lens that helps to conceptualize crisis management. As care integrates urgency and timelessness (Villa 2020), it lends itself to an analysis of how the Covid-19 pandemic moved beyond the everyday/exception binary. To do so, it mobilises an analytics of banality/spectacle to account for the dynamic movements of the moral economy of care underlying the Covid-19 crisis (see Fassin 2021). To trace these movements, it turns to two specific locales associated with the ‘beginning’ of the pandemic in the German context: public expressions of solidarity with care workers and media coverage of care work and infrastructures related to the first infections detected. Following the oscillations between spectacle and banality then serves to problematise differential regimes of care’s temporality. While spectacular care adheres to a modern imaginary of time as unfolding progressively through adequate solutions and fixes, and lends itself to an orderly temporal narrative of the pandemic, banal care relates to time as an endurant work in the present that needs to go-on without the promise of immediate betterment. Tracing how Covid’s spectacles of care fade out into the banalities of life with disease complicates questions of temporality in crisis responses. Against the hopeful suggestion that the pandemic has enabled an epidemiological view of society (Bratton 2021), this paper problematises the ineptitude regarding the temporal underpinnings of the pandemic: its banal, endemic (non-)rupture.
