ARTICLE
Shiloh Krupar, 2023, “The Administrative Grotesquerie of Pandemic Revanchism: Propag(and)ating COVID-19 and the Operational Banality of Alt-Health,” Geografisker Annaler B Human Geography 105.2, 142-164, Special Issue “Brute Facts: Hauntings, Racisms and Collective Amnesia,” eds. Lisa M. Hoffman, Heather Merrill, and Katharyne Mitchell
ABSTRACT: This paper addresses pandemic-related propaganda as a mode of administering society, selves, and the COVID-19 virus—most spectacularly apparent in the U.S. case but by no means limited to that particular national entity. The paper examines what I call U.S. pandemic revanchism, which, in order to stoke the U.S. culture wars, propag(and)ates the COVID-19 epidemic by sensationalizing the trivial and normalizing the extraordinary, profound, or absurd. Banal forms of administrative grotesquerie mobilize a community of alt-health (non)sense and tie freedom to a viral and literally infectious resentment and retaliatory collateral mortality. The paper first develops the framework of FOOB (‘folklore of operational banality’) to scrutinize the leveling of sense and non-sense through routinized anti-establishment refusal and reactionary power relations. It then offers a performative analysis of pandemic revanchism that limns the human geographies of ignorance and violence in relation to the pandemic that throttle public discourse and reduce politics to conspiratorial tautologies. The FOOB approach refuses to simply dismiss or pathologize pandemic revanchism and, instead, tracks how this form of administration consolidates social terrains and quotidian online activity. The analysis seeks to level criticism in a way that undermines social division. It does so by remaining open to reasonable doubts about biomedicalization that are swept up in alt-health and other pandemic-related propaganda, and by foregrounding how policy, affect, and storylines routinize extremisms within the American public terrain.
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