Decoding the Pandemic, Five Years Later

Decoding the Pandemic, Five Years Later

Review of Sebastián Moreno Barreneche, The Semiotics of the Covid-19 Pandemic. Bloomsbury Advances in Semiotics. London, New York, Dublin: Bloomsbury, 2024. 

By Gary Genosko

The metaphor of explaining the Covid-19 pandemic in a “nutshell,” the figure with which Moreno begins his study, is a misnomer. The pandemic is far from small-sized, containable, easily explained in few words. The introductory effort to temporally frame the event as a “segment in time” is difficult enough, with overlapping lines from the first infected patient in 2019, to the “baptismal” start date according to the World Health Organization in March 2020, and the end date of May 2023, and beyond in post-Covid time. What the “nutshell” is supposed to contain is the shift from normal everyday life to pandemic mode, and the critical appreciation of the lack of preparation for such a rough transit, yet in terms of a strict relationality between normal and exceptional  as an “inversion in the values, meanings and connotations usually linked to the state of everyday normality” (10). 

The unmarked appearance of this rich and nuanced philosophical term “inversion”  was made famous by Hegel in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Known as the “inverted world,” which suggests a degree of unintelligibility of things turned around; yet, how it is resolved by containing the un-inverted world (sense perception within the supersensible realm) is not only a dialectical lesson, it is also a semiotic quandary: how to provide the very “object of study” when it comes to the pandemic?  For the pandemic mode must also contain the world of everyday normality to some degree. The method here is comparative: compare it with non-pandemic practices, and thus identify both new and modified old practices at work together.  While Hegel would have us posit difference and then suspend it, Moreno explains in a pregnant footnote (n. 8, 191) that the pandemic mode displayed a distinctiveness that did not amount to a unitary system. In other words, the inverted world did not contain the un-inverted world but rather added to it in significant ways.  

Moreno defines the Covid-19 pandemic as a “cultural unit,” borrowing from Umberto Eco. He considers the semiotic construction of planes of expression (texts and discourses) and content  (meanings) in their cultural contexts. Eco borrowed from both Peirce and Hjelmslev in developing an “interpretive semiotics,” which plays a role for Moreno but is overshadowed by “structural semiotics.” The elements of perceivable expression and conceptually defined content are studied in relation to one another in a way that permits the semiotician to gain access to “deeper and more abstract” meanings. Moreno’s goal is to understand the distinctiveness of the pandemic mode as a semiotic system of “signifying conglomerations” whose codes and rules function at both individual and collective levels, in local and global spheres, with numerous  and diverse cultural inflections across the world’s cultural semiospheres. His time frame is not historical but focused on a demarcated temporally near-present. The period of time from early spring 2020 to spring 2023 is packed into the “nutshell” for close analysis. 

Moreno’s theoretical and analytical perspectives are explained in Chapter 2. His analytic categories are threefold: discourses that crystallize social forces; practices that are socially scripted, syntactically sensitive goal-oriented processes (some of which arose anew, some pre-existent, others modified); and interactions that combine elements of regularity and chance, modified by sensitivity, and the demands of intentional influence.  Moreno adapts the socio-semiotics of Eric Landowski to the pandemic mode to expose the prevalence of the “programmable” intent by government in reaction to the ways in which irregularity (“uncontrolled spread”)  forged “new hegemonic interactional regimes”  (37) between humans but also between objects and environments. 

The three analytic categories are followed by three dimensions of meaning-making: cognitive (the tendency of interpretive semiotics to pursue links with biological [natural] and cultural semiotics, especially when it comes to how new situations are managed); narrative (the underlying deep structures of sense-making through which experiences are decoded); and affective (understanding emotions like fear and shame as “effects of sense” (44-5) deployed in heavily mediatized contexts. 

Noting the “intertwining” of the biological and sociocultural and eschewing the nature-culture divide, Moreno adopts a constructivist approach that can expose both the ideological character of the virus alongside its genome as tucked into the containment nutshell. This is no linguistic bugaboo, rather, it accompanies the challenge of delimitating the object of study and echoes in its own right the semiotic nomenclature adopted, such as the segmentable  “cultural unit.” Yet, returning to the cognitive dimension noted above, Moreno considers the role of scientific knowledge, neologisms and metaphors (notably war), and past pandemics. 

The first , scientific discourse, was crucial and the use of a key visual device, “flattening the curve,” merely skims the surface of the ambiguities associated with the many visual representations of the coronavirus and how to control it. In her book Viral Behaviors: Viruses and Viral Phenomena Across Science, Technology, and the Arts, Roberta Buiani explains how viruses are visually delineated and “delimit-able,” often as self-contained “lone wanderers” and this sits uneasily with what is known about their highly complicated relationality and entangled ecologies. The issue is delimitation as an epistemic-ontological problem, and Moreno’s object of study provides lessons in how this is addressed. 

The proliferation of neologisms, coinages,  pragmatic invocations of the Spanish flu, were all tools for competence-building., individually and collectively. The second dimension, narrative, concerns conflicting frames of responsibility, on the one hand, nature’s revenge against human recklessness, on the other hand, sheer contingency; or, as conflicting valorizations  of the viral itself (“hero versus villain”). As Buiani puts it in her arts-inspired research, she “embraces the viral” towards ongoing co-existence. For Moreno, pandemic affect was dominated by fear as a logic of interpretation in which facts were narratively construed to reinforce the dangers posed by the virus, toward the formation of a widespread culture of fear. However, Moreno also shows, using a reversal taken from Lotman, of the fear-threat relation: fear caused the threat by means of narrativized scenarios borrowed from fiction, notably horror, and myth, but also from governments taking pages out of the playbooks of totalitarianism, as Arendt once put it, utilizing cold logic combined with terror. As a counterpoise, Moreno richly describes discourses of hope, empathy and laughter.  One cannot help but wonder where stupidity and disinformation are located in all of this. 

Chapter 4 takes up in detail blaming, shaming and scapegoating as global phenomena during the pandemic, adapted to the digital age, and indicating deep social contents. There is a more pronounced psycho-social emphasis in these pages, and this is used to explain how values discourses were utilized to negatively construct alterities. In this manner, blaming attributed moral (ir-)responsibility in both interpersonal and impersonal terms, to known and unknown actors. While accidents of infection occurred and could be absolved as long as a known actor followed the script of protection, imagined actors were discursively constructed as vectors of contagion and attracted moral blame, for “their” alleged violations. Blaming, shaming and scapegoating transversally crossed cognitive, narrative and affective dimensions, and are plotted against narrative norms of behaviour and moral agents, these latter are either individual or collective identities defined relationally as “foreign” (they-not we) and “native” (we-our) , the former undermining the latter. 

Moreno offers a fivefold account of the mechanisms of collective identity formation in discourse: segmentation: semantic units with differential traits (national belonging); generalization: assignment of homogeneous  traits an entire class, “the Chinese”; actorialization: narrated semantic units in binaries, of the “hero-villain” type; axiologization: attribution of value to specific collective identities, positively or negatively; figurativization: the above four are enshrined in texts. For instance, the storyline of “the Chinese virus,” a Trumpian construct of scapegoating, or similar xenophobic oversimplification, built upon racial, class, or attitudinal lines.  The chapter ends with a lucid Uruguayan example (but one repeated around the world) of a superspreader event involving a blamed, shamed and scapegoated individual, using class privilege as a semiotic emblem to assign and circulate moral failure, and mete out symbolic punishments. 

Chapters 5 and 6 address the figures of “evil enemy” and “superhero healthcare workers.” The discursive enlivenment of SARS-CoV-2 was anchored in a twofold meaning-making process: monstrosity and war. The very newness of the virus and its naming followed scientific protocols, but this base code, which is only cursorily examined, eventually became plural with every mutation. At the level of figurativization, however, scientific discourse created icons through sophisticated technological mediations using various sizes, colours, resolutions, magnifications, etc., with a fairly consistent shape, that could be adapted to graphics and logos. This simplification was key to the virus’ interpretation, especially its spikey crown. Hence, even when partial, “the presence of the cultural unit ‘coronovirus’ occurs through the use of a trace that mimics its shape…” (105). Medical illustration is broached only briefly by Moreno. Buiani, however, walks us through the process of scientific visualization beginning with a black and while electron microscope scan, extraction of an image, digitization, colourization, enhancement in various ways in a layered historical process that adheres to aesthetic norms, which make the images public but also play a role in attracting funding. 

Moreno revisits a troika of theorists – Propp, Greimas and Eco – to explicate the construction of the virus as a non-human “anti-Subject.”  Axiologically, the icon was turned into a monster of sorts, “evil and not good,” sometimes anthropomorphized. Moreno carries us well beyond scientific visualization into popular image-making, utilizing animation and cartooning, which are used to give to the virus a kind of agency and affective profile: powerful, to be feared, and ugly, too. His section on coronavirus pinatas is nuanced and he brings child artists, and health communications aimed at children, into the discussion as well, ensuring that the samples discussed are inter-generational and reach into the vast domains of children’s cultures. It is in these examples that the battle against the virus as an enemy is vividly put on display, setting up nicely the transition to Chapter 6 where the focus will be on frontline healthcare workers.

Healthcare workers occupied the position of hero-helpers in battle against the enemy-anti-Subject, standing at the frontline between humanity (Subject) and the rampaging virus. Moreno articulates the semiotic mechanisms that construct the collective identity of healthcare professionals, and points out that this “new valorization” only emerged during the pandemic. Working through the actorial, axiological and figurative processes in which helper-heroes were publicly praised, the accretion of attributes in select visual representations, posters, murals, and stencils – cap, mask, gown, diagnostic instruments, and cape – display the fighting and gaming stances of these heroes. 

Moreno considers gender to “not add any sense to the textual configuration” (131), although most of the figures included are of women. This suggests that the social is slipping away from the semiotic, when a social category is de-linked to how power operates in the workforce, and in terms of recognizing the inequalities associated with traditional caregiving in many societies, and how these were transformed during the pandemic. Yet the construction of an absent addressee for such collective public displays as regular rounds of applause as a form of praise is indistinct, a generic healthcare person or group. Sometimes individual healthcare workers broke through, but generalization (beyond individuation) was the semiotic standard, and this group was not immune from negative axiologization (as sources of contagion). 

The visual discourses of superheroization shifted, Moreno tells us, from reference to myth as healthcare workers were figured with angel’s wings, superhero emblems, bearing these new coded attributes against their pre-pandemic apolitical, non-confrontational, appearances; a few counterbalances are introduced to show that the conveyance of meaning could also include gestures of love, loyalty, and solidarity. 

While Chapter 7 acknowledges that the Covid pandemic was the first to be communicated by social media, and thus a “new experience,” Moreno draws upon a number of media intertexual resources, including films, prestige television, and broadcast media sources in order to study the “effects of reality.” His attention is first to the use of derivative icons, set to soundtracks, and overblown studio stage sets, poorly parsed as content was urgently created for pandemic audiences, and then opens onto a specific topic, that of humour. Humour functioned as a coping mechanism, and it developed discursively in tandem with scepticism about official sources of information. On social media platforms amateur productions proliferated, as they were as virulent as the virus itself, and used to question social norms with a withering affective force. “Crisis memes” specific to the pandemic add a layer of reflexivity and require a competence born of the situation itself. Official communications and brand communication are also briefly discussed. 

The final Chapter 8 brings us to the human body. After all, the question of social spacing (proxemics) was elevated to the first rank as the “spatial logic of contagion” (171) brought into play rules about the separation and combination of bodies. The “doubling” of the body’s semiotic relevance during the pandemic also signals the Foucauldian problematic of control and inspection, inculcating self-discipline as the best kind of discipline. The changes in habits around commingling during the pandemic, as social-distancing, masking, and modified greeting rituals took hold, signified the presence of danger, and ushered in novel gestural routines, as in “alternatives to handshakes” borrowed from diverse cultures in which personal spaces remained “unmerged.” Examples of prayer, sports spectatorship, work, are canvassed, and the role of virtual environments is highlighted. Medical facemasks, although certainly not new, and already used by many in public in China, Korea and Japan, became normalized, as well as personalized as commodities. As potent cultural signifiers, the refusal to wear one also expressed a set of political beliefs. 

In his short Epilogue, Moreno revisits the problem of the “nutshell.” Temporal segmentation of an exceptional and discontinuous event, the pandemic mode, displayed opening and closing boundaries, yet spilled over into questions about the future. Did the pandemic have an aftermath? Are we in it?  This question was answered to some extent by vaccination, and the semiotization of vaccines points Moreno to the important role played by the syringe; yet, what is left out here is the Helper’s sure and skilled hand, for the sake of the Subject’s conquering of its enemy. 

Overall, The Semiotics of the Covid-19 Pandemic is a rigorously executed semiotic analysis of the main features of meaning-making in the exceptional timeframe of the pandemic. It has a multi-methodological foundation and generates many useful analytic categories for those interested in carrying forward its insights in the revivified post-pandemic space-time still struggling to reinstitute a hard to define normality.  The pandemic remains, one might say, a tough nut to crack. 

References

Roberta Buiani, Viral Behaviors: Viruses and Viral Phenomena Across Science, Technology, and the Arts, London/New York/Dublin: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2024. 

G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, Oxford: Oxford University Press,  1952. 

Gary Genosko

Professor

Faculty of Social Science and Humanities

Gary Genosko studied philosophy, art and environment at University of Toronto, University of Alberta and York University, before receiving his doctorate in Social and Political Thought at York in 1992. He has published extensively on Continental thought, specializing in the work of Jean Baudrillard and Félix Guattari. He has published monographs on communication modelling, administrative surveillance, critical semiotics, and the lives of scholarly journals. His recent research continues his expertise in technoculture (he held a 10-year Canada Research Chair in Technoculture from 2002-12), and focuses on whistleblowing and snitching. His writing on the Toronto School of communication is currently oriented toward the neglected contributions of exhibition designer and medium theorist Harley Parker.