Description
At first glance, contagion appears to be a simple phenomenon that requires drastic measures to contain it. However, on closer inspection, contagion shares characteristics with many other concerns in global governance: the more we attempt to define it, the more it disintegrates under scrutiny. One way to approach this fuzziness is to analyze the material and semiotic construction of objects in a granular and very detailed manner. With our paper, we seek to offer a different approach. We suggest that the multiplicity of contagion should be as well approached by a mode of ‘looking at’ the surface of large objects – and not only by de-blackboxing their construction. Such an approach moves beyond objects of global governance as created and produced by expertise.
Bringing into conversation the academic debates on object IR and on visual studies, we introduced the idea of iterative picturing as a means to, firstly, preserve the largeness of contagion as an object by looking at its surface, and second, to also broaden our understanding of these objects not only as a manifestation of expertise but as experience. We argue that objects of global governance are inevitably, though to varying degrees, experienced and that this experience contributes significantly to their status as large objects. We introduced three interrelated views on the surface of contagion in the empirical context of the COVID-19 pandemic, which, taken together, emphasize the complexity and fluidity of contagion as a large object: the epidemiological, clinical, and personal view.
