TY - JOUR
T1 - The Law of the Excluded Middle
T2 - Discourse as Casualty of the Post-Truth Extremist Response to the Coronavirus Pandemic
AU - Hendlin, Yogi Hale
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2021.
PY - 2021/3/24
Y1 - 2021/3/24
N2 - The unprecedented World Health Organization orchestrated lockdown and public health measures in response to the SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 pandemic were enacted by virtually every government worldwide. In many countries, but especially the United States, long-standing political animosities congealed into a discourse of dehumanization between liberal establishment adherents and anti-state revolutionaries. Left out from the field were the plural voices fitting neither camp. Mikhail Bakhtin’s lens of Ideologiekritik offers a diagnosis, and the symbolic destabilizing tool of the carnivalesque provides a discursive tool to soften the political polarization and depoliticized technocracy of the coronavirus pandemic state of exception. The conflagration of the global coronavirus governmental response and the often violent counter-responses warrants examining the democratic dangers of dualistic discourses. Disrupting this explosive polarization requires reintroducing plural discursive spaces which widen the conversation to include liminal and oblique perspectives via spectacle and jest—the carnival—providing a potential nonviolent path forward.
AB - The unprecedented World Health Organization orchestrated lockdown and public health measures in response to the SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 pandemic were enacted by virtually every government worldwide. In many countries, but especially the United States, long-standing political animosities congealed into a discourse of dehumanization between liberal establishment adherents and anti-state revolutionaries. Left out from the field were the plural voices fitting neither camp. Mikhail Bakhtin’s lens of Ideologiekritik offers a diagnosis, and the symbolic destabilizing tool of the carnivalesque provides a discursive tool to soften the political polarization and depoliticized technocracy of the coronavirus pandemic state of exception. The conflagration of the global coronavirus governmental response and the often violent counter-responses warrants examining the democratic dangers of dualistic discourses. Disrupting this explosive polarization requires reintroducing plural discursive spaces which widen the conversation to include liminal and oblique perspectives via spectacle and jest—the carnival—providing a potential nonviolent path forward.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85103098030&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1177/1743872121999737
DO - 10.1177/1743872121999737
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85103098030
SN - 1743-8721
JO - Law, Culture and the Humanities
JF - Law, Culture and the Humanities
ER -