Opening Remarks

by Professor Sumita S. Chakravarty

Good afternoon and welcome to a panel discussion on “Pandemic Media and Emergent Infrastructures.” My name is Sumita Chakravarty and I’m a faculty member in Media Studies at the New School. I want to start by thanking all of you for being here, and to our presenters and their respondents, all of whom have taken time out of their busy schedules and pressing deadlines to be part of what I hope will be an exciting and robust exchange of ideas. I also want to thank the School of Media Studies for making this event possible, and particularly to Janelle McKenzie, Alexandra Shinert, and Jose Benitez for their help in setting things up.

At the outset, a quick note on the format. In the interests of time, we will have the Q & A at the end, after all the presentations. However, please submit your questions in the Chat as we go along, mentioning which presenter it is directed to. We will take your questions in order. There is a short break after the first two presentations (no more than 10 mins) so that you can stretch your legs and get a drink of water. We hope that you will come back and stay till the end. We will be recording this panel discussion and a transcript will be available in a few weeks on the m2lab website. 

 

With that, let me start by saying a few things about the genesis of this event which arose somewhat spontaneously as a way to mark the first anniversary of this deadly virus last month. The time seemed opportune to take an inventory of the ways in which the pandemic has  affected our individual and collective lives and routines, and particularly how we might conceptualize a wide array of practices in which media technologies are playing so fundamental a part. How does a pandemic skew or inflect our definitions of media? How are past practices of virtuality being retooled to address social isolation and quarantine? How can theories of infrastructure be extended to include both fragility and resilience, both the material and the immaterial, virtual, and symbolic? Quite coincidentally, the very notion of “infrastructure” is being hotly debated in political circles at this time, following on the heels of media theorists who have been increasingly attentive to it. Will this pandemic expand our notions of infrastructure as well? While we do not pretend to have answers to all these questions, we hope that the primarily empirical approach taken here can serve, as Walter Benjamin hoped, as a means of social and historical reflection.  Seeing ‘pandemic media’ as a constellation of such practices calls for new ways to think about our social and symbolic infrastructures.

Speaking personally, I find myself bizarrely alternating between a state of mourning—for the pre-Covid life that I’d come to take for granted—and a feeling of cosmic privilege that I’m being allowed to experience a collective human trauma that is truly global in scope. As the simple pleasures of life have vanished—of freely mingling with our friends and relatives, of making travel plans, of the din and chatter in our office spaces that may have gone for the foreseeable future—replaced by virtual gatherings (such as this one!), remote learning, the zoomification of the world... How are we making sense of these shifts? In what ways are some questions of media and cultural studies—of ontology, aesthetics, politics, and technics—being rethought yet again?

 

Indeed, the proliferation of media, of language as one form of description that seeks to make manageable the complexities of our condition has been startling, if unsurprising. Recently, the British news site, the Guardian, reported that 1200 new German words had been added to the German language since the pandemic. I quote: “It includes feelings many can relate to, such as overzoomed (stressed by too many video calls), Coronaangst (when you have anxiety about the virus) and Impfneid (envy of those who have been vaccinated).” I also learned the word “skinhunger,” the need for human touch denied to us during quarantine, and the list goes on. 

 

I want to briefly mention three conceptual frames that were inspirations for this event:

 

1. The first relates to ideas of movement and travel and how these have been linked to identity in new (and old) ways, with some deadly repercussions. In March of 2020, my students, and students everywhere were asked to “go home” and many flew to their native countries as the only place that they could feel safe and get medical treatment, should the need arise. In the U.S. the former president talked of an alien invasion, a “China virus,” an invisible enemy. It has unleashed a rash of attacks against Asian-Americans that are as horrendous as they are inexplicable. Terms like “vaccine nationalism” and “vaccine passports” serve as infrastructures of policing and border control. What constitutes the migratory politics of a virus? Over 60 years ago, Susan Sontag alerted us to the power of words by tracing historically the ways in which tuberculosis and cancer (and later AIDS) shaped attitudes towards disease. Her analysis is still relevant today.

 

2. The second inspiration is a book called “Cultures of Contagion” by MIT Press that will only be out in October of this year. It is edited by two French historians and contributed to by a huge contingent of European scholars. From the website description, one learns that the book recounts episodes from the history of contagions, from ancient times to the 21st century. It looks at “a wide range of social, cultural, political, or anthropological instances . . . through the prism of contagion—from anti-Semitism to migration, from the nuclear contamination of the planet to the violence of Mao's Red Guard.” Contagion is at once process, metaphor and critical tool. I am similarly inspired to think of terms like pandemic and pandemic media as interpretive tools that can help us identify, perhaps, constituents of media that relate to, interact with, comment on, and extend our awareness of the virus.

 

3. The third inspiration for this discussion comes from media studies scholar John Durham Peters and his expansive notion of both media and infrastructures. In his book, The Marvelous Clouds,’ Peters makes the case for not only thinking of the elements (fire, earth, sky, water) as media, bearing out his notion of media as environments rather than simply technologies or means of communication. He calls media agencies of order ; my notion of “pandemic media” can be similarly poised as a kind of ordering principle, in both political and epistemological senses. Around the pandemic have arisen societal strictures of ‘command and control’ but also new ways of ordering the sensorium, the management of the senses, so to speak. 

 

The presenters are addressing today’s topic from various perspectives and in keeping with their ongoing work on projects. Together these constitute a dense web of societal and individual modes of action and experience under conditions of quarantine and isolation, but also of virtual community and contact, of creativity and compassion. Rachel’s examples of parasocial connections, Isabel’s intimations of collapse, Nick’s explanation of resilience engineering, and Guillermina’s reading of Covid-related photographs serve to underscore the critical potential of pandemic media as a lens and a concept.