The Viral and the Virtual: Looking through the Pandemic | DOT Talks Webinar Series
Channel: Tetso College
Date: 2021-01-11

The Viral and the Virtual: Looking through the Pandemic

The virus itself is neither viral nor virtual, but its impact is. The impact creates stereotypes, it creates suspicion of the Other. The Other is constructed to hide the ‘harmful effects’ against an entire group. The corona fear creates such Other from those who are harmed by corona, be it a neighbor, or be it a distant actor. The harm of poverty, hunger, unemployment, insolvency suffered by migrants during lockdown is ignored with full knowledge while there is no calculation that predicted 1500 deaths even after 40 days of lockdown. So what it takes to make corona effect viral is this oblique intention of predictable harm in the inability to mitigate the virus. As a further impact, a moment of crisis strengthens concentration of power by rigid control over citizens, by stiffening strangleholds over human freedom as such. Indirect surveillance and a penal regime shifts essential activities from being contact based to virtual blockchains and supply side management. This goes on to create a zombie economy and polity that disposes of the less recognizable lives. The talk would elaborate how Pandemic has stifled the space of freedom in many different ways. Those who are spreading infodemic in terms of post-covid ‘business not as usual’ are creating a fear of future that authoritarian politicians can exploit. Therefore, the pandemic teaches us many lessons that can contest the business as unusual as the present, which needs to be learnt and understood in the right way.

About the Speaker
Prasenjit Biswas is a post-structuralist philosopher trained in ideas of Esposito, Agamben, Derrida, Flusser and others who established the relation between Immunity and Community. In his recent writing, Prasenjit Biswas has brought out the links between Pandemic, Economy and Norms of Distancing. He is a published author. Currently he is in the Department of Philosophy at North Eastern Hill University (NEHU), Shillong.