AnglesNew Perspectives on the Anglophone World 

12 | 2021 (numéro ouvert)COVID-19 and the Plague YearYan Brailowsky and Camille Noûs (dir.)

Electronic versionURL: https://journals.openedition.org/angles/3356DOI: 10.4000/angles.3356ISSN: 2274-2042

PublisherSociété des Anglicistes de l'Enseignement Supérieur

Electronic referenceYan Brailowsky and Camille Noûs (dir.), Angles, 12 | 2021, “COVID-19 and the Plague Year” [Online],Online since 01 March 2021, connection on 22 December 2021. URL: https://journals.openedition.org/angles/3356; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/angles.3356

Cover captionMash-up: Left: Letter carrier in New York wearing mask for protection against influenza. New York City,October 16, 1918. National Archives at College Park, MD. Record number 165-WW-269B-15. Right:USPS mailman in New York City wearing mask against COVID-19 and checking his mobile phone,January 30, 2021.Cover creditsNational Archives at College Park, MD; Anonymous.

This text was automatically generated on 22 December 2021.

Angles est mise à disposition selon les termes de la Licence Creative Commons Attribution 4.0International.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Co-vidding Shakespeare: Creating Collective Videos from Shakespeare’s Plays during theCOVID-19 PandemicSarah Hatchuel

She Says, He Says: “What Do You Mean?”Sandy Feinstein and Bryan Wang

Diamond Princess IIA Graphic TaleAmine Barbuda

Handle with CareThe Biopolitics of Coronavirus-Prevention GuidelinesEric Daffron

The American Government and “Total War” on COVID-19Christopher Griffin

Operation Warp Speed as a “Moonshot”: Some Public Policy LessonsNicholas Sowels

Hashtags in Linguistic Anthropology: A COVID-19 Case StudyV Shri Vaishali and S. Rukmini

Pandemic Apocalypse In Between Dystopias: Observations from Post-Apocalyptic NovelsMunir Ahmed Al-Aghberi

Varia

An A or Your Life!Some assessment issues on a tobacco-free, but gun-friendly, campus in the United StatesClaire Tardieu

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Co-vidding Shakespeare: CreatingCollective Videos fromShakespeare’s Plays during theCOVID-19 PandemicSarah Hatchuel

1 As soon as lockdowns started all over the world in 2020, the story that Shakespeare

wrote King Lear in quarantine at a moment when theatres had to close all over England

because of the plague in the early 17th century began to appear in the news and social

networks (Dickson 2020). This anecdote might be true or not, but the fact that

Shakespeare was soon connected to COVID and its dire cultural consequences is

significant in itself and raises the following question: how can theatre practitioners,

and artists in general, continue to create during a pandemic? And, for that matter, how

can teachers in film and theatre studies continue to pass on knowledge and skills to

their students? In what follows, I offer a particular account of how these two questions

can interact.

The year before the pandemic: Love’s Labour’s Won

2 In September 2018, I started working as a professor in Film and Media studies at the

University Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, after being a professor in English Literature at

the University of Le Havre Normandie. The shift in scholarly fields implied that, instead

of teaching film to students who were already familiar with Shakespeare, I now had to

convince film students that Shakespeare could bring much to their personal and

professional journey, and to their understanding of theatre and film. At the MA level, I

began teaching a second-semester class entitled “Filming Theatre” with a specific focus

on Shakespeare’s plays, to nearly a hundred students in Film and in Theatre. The aim

was (and is) to explore the different ways of transforming a play written for the stage

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into an audio-visual object and to analyse the relations between an ephemeral live

performance and a film that may preserve the memory of a show.

3 Through concrete examples, we examine the different modalities of the “theatrical

film” (from mere recording to adaptation, from appropriation to “plays within films”),

the several layers of discourses that allow screenwriters to turn a play-text to a film

script, the ontological differences between the two arts, as well as the complex visions

that films give of the theatre (especially through mirror films in which the embedded

stage performance echoes the main story). I especially study scenes that are written

specifically for the stage and which challenge filmic adaptation, such as the opening

Chorus of Henry V (which explicitly refers to the original conditions of performance at

the Globe theatre) or the Dover Cliff scene from King Lear (the power of which precisely

resides in the ambiguous presence of the cliff, created through Edgar’s words addressed

to his father).1

4 This course requires students to create a short video (5-10 minutes long) of a scene

from a Shakespeare play, accompanied by a statement of intent describing the project

and explaining the choices of mise-en-scène. With this work, students must show that

they have acquired specific knowledge (how to situate their artistic endeavours in the

history of Shakespeare on screen) and skills (how to find actors, or act themselves; how

to write a script, film it, edit the rushes; add music and subtitles in postproduction).

Students may adapt the text slightly, for instance adopting a queer perspective, but

Shakespeare’s scenes must still be recognized at first sight. If the film’s language is

French, the video must be subtitled in English; if the performance is in English, it must

be subtitled in French – this task invites students to reflect on the fact that the work

they produce will be made freely available to a large audience on YouTube. Students

work in groups of three, four or five so that they can develop their abilities to

collaborate and distribute tasks efficiently. They can organize their work on the project

as they wish, ask amateur/professional actors or technicians to help them with the

video and collaborate with MA English students. In May, they have to hand in their

videos and intention notes, which I mark according to four criteria:

relevance and originality of the video concept;

clarity and quality of the script and of the acting;

technical direction (image, sound, editing);

subtitling (quality of the technical insertion; quality of the translation).

5 During the spring of 2019, nearly thirty Shakespearean videos were produced, adapting

scenes from Macbeth, As You Like It, King Lear, A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Romeo and

Juliet, etc. Seven of them were real gems, with brilliant ideas. They were uploaded on a

dedicated YouTube channel and publicly shown during the World Shakespeare on

Screen Congress that was organised in Montpellier in September 2019. These seven

videos were also placed on the Moodle learning platform to inspire the following class

in 2020.

6 As far as Shakespearean videos are concerned, YouTube exemplifies several trends,

identified and explored by Ayanna Thompson (2015): the archival impulse, preserving

and sharing older performances of plays; the pedagogical impulse, often implemented by

large theatre companies or Shakespearean institutions, which share educational

commentaries on plays to be used as supplements for students and teachers alike; the

parodic impulse, for instance providing a “rap” version of a play or debunking a play’s

patriarchal/sexist/racist ideology.2 According to Stephen O’Neill (2014: 3), YouTube can

•

•

•

•

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be of great value for students “since what emerges is a sense of Shakespeare as a body

of knowledge that is shifting, incomplete and thus awaiting new interventions. In this

way, YouTube Shakespeare not only has much to offer as archive, as a platform for

vernacular expression, as a space to participate in what Shakespeare means.”

7 In order to ‘vid’ Shakespeare, i.e. to create short videos out of his plays, upload them on

internet platforms and take part in their own ways in this ever-shifting meaning of

Shakespeare, my 2019 students adopted various strategies, exemplified in the seven

selected films. The parodic impulse is not evident (except in the Variations on a balcony

video, which offers different ways of performing the Romeo and Juliet balcony scene,

following the sitcom codes, or the horror film conventions, for instance), but what is

striking is the personal, original take on each Shakespearean scene. Students earnestly

attempted to find an angle that had not been explored in previous filmic adaptations of

the plays. In fact, videos already uploaded on YouTube were far less inspirational than

cinematic versions analysed in class. Some students chose to shoot scenes indoors or

outdoors with several actors together, before cutting and editing their rushes: Coemedia

(As You Like It), Variations on a balcony, Juliette and Julia, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Act 3

scene 1). Others went for animated pictures, so that they didn’t have to act or find actors

and could focus on elaborating striking visual tableaux (Macbeth Act 4 scene 1). One

group decided on revisiting the Dover Cliff scene in King Lear, challenged as they were

by the different film versions that we had studied in the classroom (see ‘The Cliff (King

Lear)’). To a BBC radio production of the scene, they added clips taken from eclectic

sources and produced a daring poetic film essay, based on landscape exploring,

climbing and falling.

This media file cannot be displayed. Please refer to the online document http://

journals.openedition.org/angles/3415

8 Another group worked on the balcony scene in with gifted training actors based in New

York (Sarah Bitar as Juliet and Fritz Bucker as Romeo). The idea behind the Balcony

Screen video was to adapt the balcony scene to the social network era in which young

people can meet randomly in chatrooms. The lovers’ webcam-based conversation, with

Juliet’s ‘window’ screen placed above Romeo’s, reproduces and remediates the

verticality of the original meeting (see ‘The Balcony Scene’).

This media file cannot be displayed. Please refer to the online document http://

journals.openedition.org/angles/3415

9 These last two examples – one based on poetic montage, the other on digital meeting –

may have helped and guided the 2020 class when the virus hit.

March-May 2020 : Love’s Labour’s Lost… or not

10 From March 16, 2020, all universities closed down in France due to the COVID-19

pandemic. Teachers could no longer meet their students face to face; collective projects

were threatened – especially the Shakespeare vidding project since students could

neither meet to organize their work nor go out to shoot scenes. All their preparatory

work that started in February on script writing, casting, location spotting, rehearsals,

storyboarding and technical preparations first seem to have been all in vain. My role as

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a teacher was to reassure them in these difficult times and offer new assessment

modalities. To protect themselves and others, I obviously encouraged them to respect

lockdown and to favour communications by phone, email, video calls and collaborative

work tools such as Framapad. I asked them to send me either the completed video (if

they had managed to shoot their scenes before lockdown) or a very detailed script and

storyboard (with detailed directions). The script had to be written in both French and

English and give a precise idea of what the final video would have looked like.

11 Understandably, student groups overwhelmingly chose to hand in detailed scripts,

some going as far as including photos of shooting locations, actors’ pictures, precise

shooting technical sheets and screen captures taken from well-known films to provide

a sense of what their own videos would have looked like. Nevertheless, despite the fact

that it was forbidden to go out, meet and shoot on location, two groups managed to

find alternate ways and produce though-provoking videos. Coincidently or not, the two

films were based on Macbeth, notably including excerpts from Lady Macbeth’s

sleepwalking/hand-washing scene, no doubt inspired by the world-wide prevailing

discourse on hygiene to control the virus, but also by the nihilistic, apocalyptic feel of

the lockdown situation. This nicely echoes the hand-washing Lady Macbeth meme that

was circulated during the Coronavirus crisis (Smith 2020).

Figure 1: Lady Macbeth handwashing meme

Source: https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/2020/mar/the-history-behind-the-lady-macbeth-coronavirus-meme.html

12 The first video, simply entitled Macbeth Act 5 scene 1, is the product of the collaboration

between two students in theatre studies and three in film studies. They imagined that

the sleepwalking scene is taking place during the COVID-19 crisis. In this rewriting, the

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scene becomes a remote interview between a female journalist (formerly the English

doctor of Physic) and a female hospital GP (formerly the waiting gentlewoman).

This media file cannot be displayed. Please refer to the online document http://

journals.openedition.org/angles/3415

13 The two characters meet via a video-conferencing software and debrief their

experience of watching the guilt-wracked Lady Macbeth as she recollects her horrid

acts in a hospital bathroom. Her speech may have been captured by a surveillance

camera without her knowledge or consent. Lady Macbeth’s lines, which are originally

interrupted by these two characters, become a full-fledged monologue that took place

before the video call. Lady Macbeth is played by a man, thus appropriating Elizabethan

same-sex acting practices but also playing with gender stereotypes and giving the

character an even more tormented, twisted and scary look. The journalist and doctor

talk and react with great empathy as they watch Lady Macbeth’s recorded breakdown

and express their amazement and sorrow over her mental health – a response which

can be perceived as a discourse on the current state of the world affected by COVID-19.

14 The transformation of the Doctor into a journalist puts the stress on investigating

questions as she looks for the origin of the disease, echoing the constant news coverage

in hospitals and interviews with caregivers during the pandemic. In parallel, turning

the bewildered gentlewoman into a helpless doctor resonates with the current

discourse held by exhausted healthcare workers, marked physically and mentally by

the shortage of masks and medical equipment, the lack of sleep and the fear of

infecting their loved ones. The gentlewoman thus becomes the voice of Western science

and institutions which, despite their self-proclaimed sophistication, have not coped

well in managing the COVID-19 pandemic.

15 The second video is entitled Witches’ Wishes and was made by four theatre students and

two film students. Although it is also adapted from Macbeth, it offers a very different

take on the play. Classic narration and representation here give way to an experimental

and expressionist black-and-white montage, mixing speeches from the Witches and

Lady Macbeth with images of different kinds that cogently illustrate them – shots of the

Yellow Vests demonstrations and vigils in France, shots of downtown Montpellier

taken before lockdown, images filmed at home by each student with their own cameras

or phones.

This media file cannot be displayed. Please refer to the online document http://

journals.openedition.org/angles/3415

16 The film gives simultaneously a sense of still-life (through Gothic ruins shot in extreme

low angles, desolate attics, white statues, wooden masks, the skull of a cow, wood

rotting in murky water…) and abounding, swarming life with shots of moving animals

(dogs, horses, cats, snails and slugs) and unidentifiable humans (a running girl, a

woman doing her hair in the shadow, feet repeatedly knocking on wood, muddy hands

being washed in a sink). The film also works on the opposition between elemental

nature (through shots of trees, gardens, flowers, river, fire) and human artefacts

(abandoned castles, tables, stairs, jars filled with food). It also offers stark contrast

between the macrocosmic (with regular shots of the Moon and the sky) and the prosaic

(water flushed down the toilets). Extreme close-ups of mouths, tongues and meat being

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sliced up, as well as the slight reverberation of the voice-over and the constant change

in image formats (from vertical shots taken by a phone to horizontal taken by a

camera), create a nightmarish atmosphere. The devilish trinity of Witches is reflected

in the three split screens, where three white horses appear. The smoke, bubbly water

and statues of clay are also reminiscent of Orson Welles’s 1948 film version (Welles

1948), but the video takes the canonic film to an experimental level where there is no

longer any character nor story – just evanescence and pure experience. Much

importance was given to extradiegetic sound. The students composed original music to

irrigate the women’s speeches, going for what they called “a post-apocalyptic folk

style” to convey the dreamlike aspects turning into psychological nightmares. The

music is at once scary, haunting and intoxicating, accompanying the voices of the

mind: these inner voices, often heard with echoes, invite us to think in terms of

schizophrenia and madness. With such weird mixture of images and sound, the video

itself becomes the Witches’ potion recipe.

17 In these two instances, the COVID crisis created constraints which acted as artistic

catalysts for students: they started to pay attention to some situations in Shakespeare’s

plays that they might have overlooked otherwise and, more importantly, lockdown

forced them to be more imaginative in the ways they made the videos, inserting video-

conferencing platforms in their scripts or filming shots on their own and then using

editing software to make a coherent video and give it an art-house feel. The pandemic

thus provided the inspiration for the themes they broached but also stirred them into

trying new formats that respected physical distancing and nonetheless circumvented

lockdown. As far as teachers are concerned, lockdown revealed how valuable and

essential face-to-face teaching is, but also how the link with students can be maintained

via technological means, so that they never lose motivation, drive and hope in these

exceptionally difficult times. These COVID Shakespearean videos (or Shakespearean

COVID videos?) are, in fact, testimonies to the paramount effect this sanitary, economic

and social crisis has had on our students, which perhaps represents for them what 9/11

has meant for my generation – a watershed event, one that creates a “before” and an

“after”, calling for a complete change in the world policies and equilibriums (a change

which, unfortunately, has not yet happened). The statements of intent that students

have written to accompany their videos, denouncing the French government’s

mismanagement of the sanitary crisis and the destruction of public medical services,

give me hope that this generation will be more politically aware and more ready to

fight than we were, so that, to put it simply and brutally, the Anthropocene does not

mean ultimately the extinction of our species.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dickson, Andrew. “Shakespeare in lockdown: did he write King Lear in plague quarantine?” The

Guardian. 22 March 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2020/mar/22/shakespeare-in-

lockdown-did-he-write-king-lear-in-plague-quarantine

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Hatchuel, Sarah. Shakespeare, from Stage to Screen. Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 2000.

Hatchuel, Sarah. “Filming Metatheatre: the ‘Dover Cliff’ Scene on Screen.” Victoria Bladen, Sarah

Hatchuel and Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin eds. Shakespeare on Screen: King Lear. Cambridge,

Cambridge UP, 2019. 65-77.

O’Neill, Stephen. Shakespeare and YouTube: New Media Forms of the Bard. London, Bloomsbury, 2014.

Smith, Emma. “'Out damned spot': the Lady Macbeth hand-washing scene that became a

Coronavirus meme.” Penguin.co.uk. 12 March 2020. https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/2020/

mar/the-history-behind-the-lady-macbeth-coronavirus-meme.html

Thompson, Ayanna. “Othello/YouTube.” CUP Online Resources. In Sarah Hatchuel and Nathalie

Vienne-Guerrin, eds. Shakespeare on Screen: Othello. Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 2015. https://

www.cambridge.org/download_file/866568

Welles, Orson. Macbeth. 107 mn. Mercury Productions. Republic Pictures. 1948.

Videos

The Balcony Screen. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIovoISQF1k&t=61s

The Cliff (King Lear). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iov4wEryytc&t=266s

Macbeth Act 1 scene 5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVue6j58Kvs

Witches’ Wishes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=futXiEzOnQI&t=363s

NOTES

1. On these filmic challenges, see Hatchuel (2000; 2019).

2. See for instance the “Sassy Gay Friend” series of videos, which revisit Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet

or Othello: https://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=SysESR_X8GE&list=PLc6oA7ZelLySDydrW3b76vVHMLtw4hYzA

ABSTRACTS

This essay explores the pedagogical and artistic consequences of the COVID crisis on the “Filming

Theatre” MA course at the University of Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, in which students have to

create short videos from Shakespeare’s plays.

Cet article examine les conséquences du COVID, en matière pédagogique et artistique, sur le

cours « Filmer le théâtre » du Master Cinéma à l’université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, cours dans

lequel les étudiants et étudiantes doivent réaliser de brèves vidéos à partir des pièces de

Shakespeare.

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INDEX

Mots-clés: Shakespeare William, vidéo, film, enseignement, COVID-19

Keywords: Shakespeare William, video, film, teaching, COVID-19

AUTHOR

SARAH HATCHUEL

Sarah Hatchuel is Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University Paul-Valéry Montpellier

3 (France) and former president of the Société Française Shakespeare. She has written

extensively on adaptations of Shakespeare's plays (Shakespeare and the Cleopatra/Caesar Intertext:

Sequel, Conflation, Remake, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2011; Shakespeare, from Stage to

Screen, Cambridge University Press, 2004; A Companion to the Shakespearean Films of Kenneth

Branagh, Blizzard Publishing, 2000) and on TV series (Lost: Fiction vitale, PUF, 2013; Rêves et series

américaines: la fabrique d’autres mondes, Rouge Profond, 2015; The Leftovers: le troisième côté du

miroir, Playlist Society, 2019). She is general coeditor of the CUP Shakespeare on Screen collection

and of the online journal TV/Series. Contact: s_hatchuel [at] hotmail.com

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She Says, He Says: “What Do YouMean?”Sandy Feinstein and Bryan Wang

“Words, words, words” Hamlet, II.ii.192

1 Twenty-five years ago, I argued with a colleague in biology about his use of the word

“success.” “Success,” he said, refers to reproduction, a species’ survival. The word

choice, I said, was telling: it reflected a particular attitude to reproduction, and to those

responsible for it, namely women. “It’s just what it means,” he countered. “There is no

‘just what it means,’” I growled.

2 Biologists name things in Latin, a language few of them now study. Blame it on

Linnaeus who ordered the world in Latin binomials. Modern scientists, however, no

longer have a classical education; they are not usually trained for the Church. Not

surprisingly, their pronunciation of the species they name can be head-turning to those

who have studied the language, for being not quite classical Latin and not at all

Medieval Latin.

3 “Success” is derived from Latin in pronounceable modern English; the word appears in

the 16th century during what was once called the English Renaissance, where Latin

would be “reborn” in a putative return to the classical forms that would increasingly

limit its use.

4 “Coronavirus” is another word derived from the Latin, coined much later, in 1968, with

charming self-consciousness: “In the opinion of the eight virologists, these viruses are

members of a previously unrecognized group which they suggest should be called the

coronaviruses” (OED). “Suggest” and “should” — quite a juxtaposition to characterize

the appellation: insinuation with necessity, Latin and Middle English. The virologists’

reasoning is based, as the quotation continues, on the virus’s “characteristic

appearance,” namely of the “solar corona.” Metaphors are dangerous. Latin is not a

dead language.

5 The coronavirus has been extraordinarily successful. It doesn’t breed like the creatures

understood by Linnaeus and Darwin. Neither did they imagine it. Not Linnaeus in his

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“Paradoxa,” not Darwin in his evolutionary tree. New pictures and graphs and models

now give the word, coronavirus, authority.

6 It all begins with letters — DNA and RNA, signifying Deoxyribonucleic Acid and

Ribonucleic Acid — their transcription and translation, mutations: litterae, transcriptio,

translatio, mutatio. The coronavirus is relentless in its replication: A, C, G, T into A, C, G,

U, color coded, not quite 30,000 of them copied over and over. A reading that reads

itself, its microscopic text barely legible. Only a select few can see what can’t be seen

and understand what they do see. Metaphors mean something to those who make

them: to Jacob and Monod, for two, who explained, “A gene participates in two distinct

chemical processes. In the first, for which the term replication should be reserved, […]

an identical sequence or replica of the original sequence [is formed]” (Jacob & Monod

1961: 193). “Replica,” also Latin, is literal, to the letter. The letters in “the second

process, which we shall call transcription, [allow] the gene to perform its physiological

function” (OED). The process does the work; the scientists provided a name for it. Were

I a scientist, I might know, and could say, “The way the coronavirus copies its genome

challenges and stretches these definitions — Jacob and Monod didn’t account for RNA

as possible genetic material.” But those are not my words, they are Bryan Wang’s,

another biologist who checks my accuracy, adds meaning I wouldn’t, couldn’t, make. I

only transcribe his words, copy and paste, wonder at biologists as lexicographers.

7 Translation is an older word than transcription, one more intimate, or confident, with

language. Translation converts letters — whether Arabic alefto “A” — or (ا)

combinations of symbols, whether words or, starting in the 1950s, DNA or RNA, into

another language or state. Bryan tries to make me understand the usage as biological

process. He says, “The code in nucleic acids is ‘read’ to generate proteins, which enact

the function of the gene. Thus is the gene ‘expressed.’” He has used these words in

class, and each time he does I think about the words while our students absorb the

lesson without dwelling on expression; his efforts to draw their attention to the word

wink at me, the English teacher, but are obviously not the point. I dwell on the word,

“expressed,” a term of alchemy, here an extraction by my hand from his keypad into

the margins of my manuscript, letters added to letters, transcriptions to transcriptions,

translation to translation.

8 But “mutation”? The Anglo-Norman word “change” might be more to the purpose. The

translation comes weighted like “success,” no matter the intended literal meaning. The

success of the virus is in how its characteristics differ from its “parents” or in the

marked alteration of its genome and its translation. But to refer to those changes as

mutations conjures the related word “mutant,” with all its sci-fi negative connotations,

as if there were an ideal original, a perfect, intended, First Being. Change is never

welcome.

9 “Mutation” is, or was, a term in linguistics. Even so, when it comes to the metaphor

introduced with the letters of DNA, I prefer scribal error, a literal wandering by the

transcriber from the text, perhaps as a misreading that, in turn, compensates for what

the illegible or smudged letter must be, or, perhaps, presumes, a “better” one based on

a problematic reading. Mutation shifts the focus from the elegant metaphors of

language, transcription and translation, to a process eluding control. Mutability herself

is a figure who when “she at first her selfe began to reare, / Gainst all the Gods, and

th’empire sought from them to beare” (Spenser, FQ.VII.vi.1.9). She embodied disruptive

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powers well before Linnaeus imposed order and Darwin explained it. The poet Spenser

is unequivocal:

For, she the face of earthly things so changed,That all which Nature had establisht firstIn good estate, and in meet order ranged,She did pervert, and all their statues burst:And all the worlds faire frame (which one yet durstOf Gods or men to alter or misguide)She alter’d quite, and made them all accurst[…]. (Spenser, FQ.VII.vi.5.1-7)

10 Mutability is the change of a green leaf to a falling one. Birth ends in death under her

rule. Her curse is the unexpected, an inexplicable plague, an unimagined effect, of a

flea, of bacteria, of a virus.

11 In the context of DNA’s metaphors of literacy, mutation shifts the burden of

understanding from the hand that transcribes and translates, the expressions of figural

control, to the potential havoc wrought by what resists control, from Medieval and

Renaissance humanist rhetorical tropes to modern sci-fi dystopia.

12 Social distancing avoids metaphor altogether. Though still Latinate, it is a modern

expression, originally coined by sociologists in the last century to refer to both physical

and emotional remoteness, later to be adopted by the press in the present century to

refer to keeping a distance from others to avoid disease (OED). Its meaning has subtly

mutated. The negative connotation of keeping apart, whether intended or not, is the

subtext. “Social distancing” is the language of sociologists. But what does it mean to

others? It imposes distance through its academic sounding clumsy construction. In the

1950s, it likely reflected the illusion of objectivity once promulgated and argued as

possible in every field. Now that effect, and its affect — of academic condescension or

dissociation — may undermine its present purpose, to keep people at a distance to

avoid infection.

13 To keep cars and trucks from tailgating, the traffic sign does not say, “Vehicular

Distancing in Effect.” To get your kids’ attention — students or children — it’s unlikely

you use a multi-syllabic compounding of an abstract adjective and noun.

14 Stay away from me. Keep your distance. 6 feet, no closer. Mask.

15 Mutants penetrate air, time, space. Mutability dictates change, in what words mean, in

what happens everywhere, in nature, in a body, and in a cell.

*

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Figure 1: LEFT. Painting and Letters (Partial Transcript) of the Novel Coronavirus Responsible forCOVID-19. MIDDLE. Electron Micrographs and Partial Translation of the Coronavirus and TrimericSpike Protein. RIGHT. Mutability Overseeing a Phylogeny (Evolutionary Tree) of Coronavirus Strains,Colored According to their Host Species

Sources: Painting by David S. Goodsell, RCSB Protein Data Bank; doi:10.2210/rcsb_pdb/goodsell-gallery-019 used under a CC-BY-4.0 license. Sequences from NCBI Nucleotide database, referencesequence NC_045512.2, nucleotides 21563 to 23018 and translation of nucleotides 21563 to 25384, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore. Background image from Manuscripts and Archives Division,The New York Public Library, (1550) Towneley Lectionary [blank page], retrieved from http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e3-c71c-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99. EM illustration of thevirus by Alissa Eckert, MSMI, and Dan Higgins, MAMS, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,retrieved from https://phil.cdc.gov/Details.aspx?pid=23312. Images of the spike protein from theRCSB PDB (rcsb.org) of PDB ID 6VXX: (Walls et al. 2020). Image of “Mutabilitie” adapted from WalterCrane’s cover illustration of Spenser's Faerie Queene. A poem in six books; with the fragment Mutabilitie,edited by Thomas J. Wise, 1897, accessed from https://archive.org/details/spensersfaeriequ01spenuoft/page/n7/mode/2up. Phylogeny adapted from Nextstrain data andimage used under a CC-BY-4.0 license, https://nextstrain.org/groups/blab/sars-like-cov. (Hadfield et al.2018).

*

16 As a graduate student in biochemistry in the 90s, I studied proteins, the molecules that

provide much of the form and the function necessary for living things (and almost-

living things, like viruses) to go about the business of life (and near-life). Two problems

fascinated me. First, I wondered how the proteins observed in nature came to be — I say

“observed” and not “seen” because the molecules are too small to be analyzed except

by indirect means. Second, I wanted to explore the possibility of creating new proteins

for new practical applications. Without belaboring the training or the anxiety and

heartache that attended those long years, my project eventually “succeeded.” By

generating a large population of potential proteins, selecting those few individuals

endowed with a desired trait, subjecting the survivors to mutation, and preferentially

replicating descendants with even higher fitness — that is, by rudimentarily mimicking

evolutionary processes on the molecular scale, I created (or found) a set of completely

new proteins, a half dozen in all.

17 When scientists discover something new, they name it. The biologist Michael Ohl says,

“It is through its name that the individual is bestowed with meaning, and it is through

its naming that it becomes a part of our perception of nature” (2018: vii). And, on a

more basic level, a name lets us speak about it.

18 “My” new proteins worked in concert with a class of proteins called zinc fingers — so

named because they contain the metal zinc along with multiple appendage-like regions

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linked in tandem, like the fingers of a hand. What I had engineered were smallish

protein bits (or peptides) that induce zinc finger proteins to pair up, or dimerize.

Unimaginative but sensible, I proposed naming them simply “zinc finger dimerizing

peptides”: ZFDP1, ZFDP2, etc.

19 My thesis advisor, however, disagreed, and he suggested we instead name them peptide

1, peptide 2, and so on. Although I felt his nomenclature unimaginative and insensible

(how could others refer to what we’d discovered?), I didn’t protest. Unlike Linnaeus,

who not only named multitudes of organisms but also sorted each into its own cell

within a grid of neatly nested taxonomic boxes, my advisor apparently didn’t want to

stake a claim, and I guessed there was a reason behind his reluctance. Perhaps he felt

this territory insignificant, undeserving of title. Perhaps he saw arrogance in the very

act of naming and the assumption of ownership it implied. Perhaps he was trying to

avoid inadvertent implications.

20 A name makes sense. Like a metaphor, it carries meaning, establishes connections from

the named object to the word that is the name. A name may be more descriptive, or less

(at least at first), but in either case, the name eventually promotes associations, further

discussion, and inquiry. When virologists named the coronaviruses (Almeida et al.

1968), they were emphasizing an aspect of viral morphology as determined by electron

microscopy: the fringe of 200-angstrom-long projections that to them resembled the

solar corona. Scientists now refer to those projections as the spike protein, and in

current models of the virus’s lifecycle, the spike protein mediates entry of the virus

into host cells, where it replicates and causes disease.

21 Scientific names may describe more than outward appearances. When applied to an

organism, a name indicates all sorts of features shared with other kinds of organisms

while also locating that organism within the hierarchical categories of Linnaean

classifications. The same is true for viruses. Biologists categorize coronaviruses in the

taxonomic family Coronaviridae, within the order Nidovirales, in the class Pisoniviricetes,

the phylum Pisuviricota, the kingdom Orthornavirae, the realm Riboviria. These

identifiers describe the genetic material of the viruses, how they replicate, the hosts

that unwittingly help them reproduce. The agents responsible for COVID-19, the SARS

outbreak of 2003, and the MERS epidemic of 2012 are all named as coronaviruses,

implying similarity in these essential facets of their biology. Since the time of Darwin,

taxonomic names also have indicated presumed evolutionary kinship: COVID-19, SARS,

and MERS viruses likely derive from an ancestral lineage whose offspring mutated over

generations to yield these three distinct types of successful pathogens — each of which

represents its own lineage subject to further mutation as the populations grow and

spread, yielding distinct strains that may ultimately prove more (or less) durable,

infectious, deadly.

22 Scientific models are like scientific names. They’re metaphorical; they embody and

describe; they establish connections and carry meaning. Models may take the form of

images, graphs, abstract diagrams — of data, ideas, objects — and communicate

information, efficiently and (sometimes) elegantly. A phylogeny sketches the

evolutionary history of viral strains as the branches of a finely detailed tree. One may

assert that a curve has been flattened (or not); an accompanying plot of the daily death

rate over the course of a pandemic event shows it. It’s one thing to allude to the sun’s

corona; it’s another to sculpt the molecular surface of the pyramidal spike protein, the

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protrusions to which protective antibodies might attach, the clefts and cavities in

which therapeutic drugs might nestle.

23 Models don’t merely communicate meaning; as Theodore L. Brown (2003: 26) says, they

are “extended metaphors that have the potential to guide thinking about a system

under investigation, suggesting new directions for research.” They can be used to

construct meaning. Models provoke questions. Regarding the coronaviruses’

evolutionary history, what types of mutations in the viral genome correlate with

changes in host susceptibility? Models provide tentative explanations. Changes

mapping to the surface of the spike protein, as indicated by the graphical rendering of

the virus particle, may permit the virus to switch from one host (say, a bat, or a

pangolin, or a mink) to another (say, a human). Models are structures upon which to

design and build experiments. Let’s alter the spike protein and see if the resultant virus

retains the ability to infect human cells; let’s engineer an agent that occludes the spike

protein and determine if that agent ameliorates the viral disease; let’s use genetic

material encoding the spike protein to stimulate the production of antibodies that may

prevent an invading virus from infecting cells in the host — that is, let’s try to make a

vaccine.

24 Models simplify communication and enable thinking, but they are approximations. As

early as 1666, Margaret Cavendish warned how microscopy and its images distort our

perception of the natural world. Today, when we look at structures of the coronavirus

and its molecular components, we’re not seeing the things themselves. “What does

seeing mean to you?” interrupts my coauthor (and sometime co-teacher) Sandy

Feinstein, an English professor. I find the question both penetrating and unsettling. I

understand that light rearranges cellular proteins in the eye, that those movements

produce nerve impulses that the brain processes as vision. I understand that this

doesn’t adequately explain what seeing is. But I also know that the molecular

representations of coronavirus are reconstructions assembled by means even less

direct than those that concerned Cavendish. They’re models built from the detection of

electrons or X-rays, beams of radiation human eyes cannot behold. They’re calculated

models, not sights, models with descriptive and explanatory power, but models that

nevertheless are approximations, incomplete.

25 Perhaps this points to reasons for skepticism of science. Like a Latinized, italicized,

nearly unpronounceable name, a glossy picture of a virus appears — at first —

definitive. To many, seeing is believing. The models, integrating zillions of

measurements, depicting something almost inconceivably small and, therefore,

abstract and arcane, may seem beyond the reach of the non-specialist and thus are

accepted without question. Until they’re not. It takes time and care as well as expertise

to appreciate a model’s assumptions and limitations — that the phylogeny is a tentative

explanation of observations, not an historical record; that a molecular structure

averages many structures, and perhaps not the relevant ones; that projecting infections

and deaths represents the scientists’ best prediction given the data collected so far,

given our current epidemiological understanding, given the conditions as they stand

today. Science is conditional, and the nuance and uncertainty in scientific models and

the fact that science seeks continually and iteratively to refine its understanding of the

world do not sit comfortably in the Too Long; Didn’t Read era. It’s much easier to simply

declare that if the model was wrong, the science must be wrong, too.

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26 Wrong: another word to examine. The data may be inconsistent with the hypothesis; the

model may need refinement or replacement. To a scientist, such a situation would

suggest more work to be done, additional terrain to explore. But, as Sandy reminds me,

“wrong” to Peter Navarro, an economist and assistant to President Trump, means that

Anthony Fauci, a medical doctor and Director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy

and Infectious Diseases, knows nothing, is a failure, is ruining the country (Navarro

2020). To one, “wrong” is an avenue of research; to the other, it’s a political weapon.

27 So perhaps my advisor was instructing me to be careful with my words, and with other

models, too, to examine and re-examine what they mean and don’t mean and what I

mean and don’t mean, and to understand and explain the subtlety and the changing

nature of the meaning. The questions, and how to answer them, may appear

straightforward. Should I wear a mask? Should I take hydroxychloroquine? Should I vaccinate?

Or they may not be straightforward at all. Why should I believe “the science”? Is that the

truth? Really?

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Almeida, J. D., D. M. Berry, C. H. Cunningham, D. Hamre, M. S. Hofstad, L. Mallucci, K. McIntosh,

and D. A. J. Tyrrell. “Coronaviruses.” Nature 220, 1968: 650. DOI:10.1038/220650b0

Brown, Theodore L. Making Truth. Champaign: U. of Illinois P., 2003.

Cavendish, Margaret. Observations upon Experimental Philosophy. London: A. Maxwell, 1666. Early

English books online text creation partnership. http://name.umdl.umich.edu/A53049.0001.001

Jacob, François, and Jacques Monod. “On the Regulation of Gene Activity.” Cold Spring Harbor

Symposia on Quantitative Biology. 26, 1961: 193. DOI:10.1101/SQB.1961.026.01.024

Hadfield, James, Colin Megill, Sidney M. Bell, John Huddleston, Barney Potter, Charlton Callender,

Pavel Sagulenko, Trevor Bedford, and Richard A. Neher. “Nextstrain: Real-time Tracking of

Pathogen Evolution.” Bioinformatics. 34, 2018: 4121-4123. DOI:10.1093/bioinformatics/bty407

Navarro, Peter. “Anthony Fauci Has Been Wrong About Everything I’ve Interacted with Him On.”

USA Today. 14 July 2020. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/todaysdebate/2020/07/14/

anthony-fauci-wrong-with-me-peter-navarro-editorials-debates/5439374002/

Ohl, Michael. The Art of Naming. Trans. Elisabeth Lauffer. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2018.

Spenser, Edmund. Faerie Queene. “Mutabilitie Cantos.” In The Complete Works of Edmund Spenser in

Verse and Prose. Ed. Risa S. Bear. London: Grosart, 1882. http://www.luminarium.org/renascence-

editions/queeneM.html

Spenser, Edmund. Spenser's Faerie Queene. A Poem in Six Books; with the Fragment Mutabilitie. Ed.

Thomas J. Wise, pictured by Walter Crane. London: George Allen, 1897. https://archive.org/

details/spensersfaeriequ01spenuoft/page/n7/mode/2up

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Walls, A.C., Y.J. Park, M.A. Tortorici, A. Wall, A.T. McGuire, and D. Veesler. “Structure, Function,

and Antigenicity of the SARS-CoV-2 Spike Glycoprotein.” Cell 181(2), 2020: 281. DOI:10.1016/j.cell.

2020.02.058

ABSTRACTS

“She Says, He Says” is a rumination on some of the words that have dominated the conversation

on the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. It begins with a personal essay that

interrogates different ways of reading, starting with biological “success” and ranging to the

language of DNA. This first point of view, from a humanist, focuses on how scientists and social

scientists appropriate and redeploy words. A second perspective, from a scientist, reconsiders

the usages and purposes from both a personal and professional point of view. Both sections

address metaphors, or models as metaphors, to represent what and how words may mean.

"Elle dit, il dit" est une réflexion sur certains des mots qui ont dominé les discussions sur la

pandémie de Coronavirus (COVID-19). Il commence par un essai personnel qui interroge

différentes façons de lire, en commençant par le terme "succès" en biologie et en allant jusqu'au

langage de l'ADN. Ce premier point de vue, celui d'une humaniste, se concentre sur la façon dont

les scientifiques et les spécialistes des sciences sociales s'approprient et redéploient les mots. Un

second point de vue, celui du scientifique, réexamine les usages et les finalités d'un point de vue

à la fois personnel et professionnel. Les deux sections abordent les métaphores, ou les modèles en

tant que métaphores, permettant de représenter ce que les mots peuvent signifier et comment ils

le font.

INDEX

Mots-clés: COVID-19, coronavirus, mutation, transcription, traduction, gestes barrière,

métaphore, modèle

Keywords: COVID-19, coronavirus, mutation, transcription, translation, social distancing,

metaphor, model

AUTHORS

SANDY FEINSTEIN

Honors Program Coordinator & Professor of English at Penn State University, Berks College.

Sandy Feinstein’s scholarship focuses on alchemy (and other words) from Chaucer to Stoker and,

in between, on Marie Meurdrac, among other subjects and authors; she has also published

creative non-fiction, fiction, and poetry. Contact: sxf31 [at] psu.edu

BRYAN WANG

Associate Teaching Professor of Biology at Penn State University, Berks College. Bryan Wang, a

molecular biologist with industry and academic experience, has used phage display with

bacterial viruses for in vitro evolution of new proteins and X-ray crystallography to determine

their structures. He has published creative writing as well. Contact: bsw13 [at] psu.edu

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Diamond Princess IIA Graphic Tale

Amine Barbuda

Figure 1: Prologue, Diamond Princess II

Credits: Amine Barbuda.

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Figure 2: Plate 1, Diamond Princess II

Credits: Amine Barbuda.

Figure 3: Plate 2, Diamond Princess II

Credits: Amine Barbuda.

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Figure 4: Plate 3, Diamond Princess II

Credits: Amine Barbuda.

Figure 5: Plate 4, Diamond Princess II

Credits: Amine Barbuda.

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Figure 6: Plate 5, Diamond Princess II

Credits: Amine Barbuda.

Figure 7: Plate 6, Diamond Princess II

Credits: Amine Barbuda.

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Figure 8: Plate 7, Diamond Princess II

Credits: Amine Barbuda.

Figure 9: Plate 8, Diamond Princess II

Credits: Amine Barbuda.

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Figure 10: Plate 9, Diamond Princess II

Credits: Amine Barbuda.

Figure 11: Plate 10, Diamond Princess II

Credits: Amine Barbuda.

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Figure 12: Plate 11, Diamond Princess II

Credits: Amine Barbuda.

Figure 13: Plate 12, Diamond Princess II

Credits: Amine Barbuda.

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Figure 14: Plate 13, Diamond Princess II

Credits: Amine Barbuda.

Figure 15: Plate 14, Diamond Princess II

Credits: Amine Barbuda.

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Figure 16: Plate 15, Diamond Princess II

Credits: Amine Barbuda.

Figure 17: Plate 16, Diamond Princess II

Credits: Amine Barbuda.

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Figure 18: References, Diamond Princess II

Credits: Amine Barbuda.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Books

Dostoiévski, Fiódor. Os Demônios. São Paulo: Ed. 34, 2004.

Floriênski, Pavel. A Perspectiva inversa. São Paulo: Ed. 34, 2012.

Moore, Alan, and Dave Gibbons. Watchmen. New York: DC Comics, 1986-1987.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. O Nascimento da tragédia ou helenismo e pessimismo. São Paulo: Companhia Das

Letras, 2007.

Movies

Short Cuts. Altman, Robert, dir. Fine Line Features. USA, 1993. 188mn.

Magnolia. Anderson, Paul Thomas, dir. New Line Cinema. USA, 1999. 188mn.

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El ángel exterminador. Buñuel, Luís dir. Mexico, 1962. 93mn.

Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie. Buñuel, Luís dir. 20th Fentury Fox. France, 1972. 102mn.

Gojira. Honda Ishiro. Toho Films. Japan, 1954. 98mn.

ABSTRACTS

This graphic tale takes place among a group of six passengers from the Diamond Princess — a

cruise ship which formed a COVID-19 cluster in the beginning of 2020 — who meet later in the

city of Yokohama, Japan. They need to discuss a collective condition: a mental communication

between them, which they don’t know whether it can be attributed to the treatment they

received or to the original illness. The main references for this graphic tale are the movies El

ángel exterminador (1962) and Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie (1972), both written and directed

by Luís Buñuel. The movies, immersed in a surrealist atmosphere created by the relationships

between the characters, bring elements to the script that were observed at the Diamond Princess,

such as people held up in a location by an “invisible force,” a sense of broken communication,

and the spread of misleading information. These are some issues that we now have to face during

the pandemic: a combined breakdown and continuous flow of (mis)communication which

challenges the referential framework of the world we inhabit, outsourcing reflexive power onto

international bodies (such as the WHO), social media (through biographical text and video), or

the reader.

Ce récit graphique se déroule au sein d'un groupe de six passagers du Diamond Princess, un bateau

de croisière qui connut un cas de contamination collective par COVID-19 au début de l'année

2020, qui se retrouvent plus tard dans la ville de Yokohama, au Japon. Ils doivent discuter d'une

pathologie à caractère collectif : une communication mentale entre eux, dont ils ne savent pas si

elle est imputable au traitement qu'ils ont reçu ou à la maladie originelle. Les principales

références de ce récit graphique sont les films El ángel exterminador (1962) et Le charme discret de la

bourgeoisie (1972), tous deux écrits et réalisés par Luís Buñuel. Ces films, plongés dans une

atmosphère surréaliste à travers la relation des personnages, apportent au scénario des éléments

qui ont été observés au Diamond Princess, tels que des personnes bloquées dans un lieu par une

« force invisible », le sentiment d'une communication rompue, et des informations trompeuses.

Ce sont là certaines des questions auxquelles nous devons faire face aujourd'hui pendant la

pandémie : une rupture parallèle et un flux continu de (mauvaises ou fausses) communications

qui remettent en question le cadre référentiel du monde dans lequel nous vivons, tout en

externalisant le processus de réflexion vers des organismes internationaux (comme l’OMS) ou les

réseaux sociaux (par le biais de textes et de vidéos biographiques), ou encore le lecteur.

INDEX

Mots-clés: COVID-19, roman graphique, surréalisme, communication, illustration, art,

contamination

Keywords: COVID-19, graphic novel, surrealism, communication, illustration, art, contamination

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AUTHOR

AMINE BARBUDA

Amine Barbuda is a Brazilian painter, designer, scenographer, architect and urban planner. A

graduate of the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism at the Federal University of Bahia, Barbuda

also holds a Master’s degree in contemporary urban processes from the same institution. She

studies graphic narratives in several languages, graphic novels in different techniques, and

painting, especially oil painting. Recently, the artist launched two studies involving dance,

performance, composition and painting. See:

http://lattes.cnpq.br/4019471909117612

https://amine.com.br/

https://linktr.ee/AmineBarbuda

https://www.instagram.com/aminebarbuda/

https://p55.com.br/produto/metodos-frankenstein-para-a-criacao-de-uma-barbie/

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Handle with CareThe Biopolitics of Coronavirus-Prevention Guidelines

Eric Daffron

[I]f the body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is

our grasp on the world and the outline for our

projects.

— Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (2011: 46)

Politics is a fictional text in a book which is our

own body.

— Paul B. Preciado, An Apartment on Uranus:

Chronicles of the Crossing (2020: 221)

The biopolitical event, in fact, is always a queer

event, a subversive process of subjectivization

that, shattering ruling identities and norms,

reveals the link between power and freedom, and

thereby inaugurates an alternative production of

subjectivity.

— Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri,

Commonwealth (2009: 62-3)

Introduction

1 In early spring 2020, the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene

issued two sets of guidelines for reducing the risk of coronavirus infection. In addition

to recommending handwashing and other precautions, the health department declared

the following: “Do not touch your face unless you recently washed your hands” (qtd. in

Herman 2020).1 If New Yorkers could no longer touch their faces with impunity, they

were compensated with license to touch another body part. Assuming that New

Yorkers would not forego sex even during a pandemic, the health department offered

“tips for how to enjoy sex” without transmitting COVID-19. On a continuum from best

to worst choices, the department advised having sex with oneself, with someone in the

same household, and with a limited number of other sex partners. “You are your safest

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sex partner,” the department explained. “Masturbation will not spread COVID-19,

especially if”—it was quick to add—“you wash your hands […] with soap and water for

at least 20 seconds before and after sex” (NYC Health 2020).

2 Those two self-touching recommendations might initially strike us as straightforward

and pragmatic. However, if we examine those guidelines more closely, we will see that

they invited New Yorkers to engage in a new relationship with their bodies. Notice,

first of all, that, in their starkest formulation, the guidelines were organized around a

binary opposition. New York City’s health department supplied one half of the binary:

“Do not touch your face.” If we rewrite the other guideline in parallel terms, we have

the other half: do touch your genitals. Expressed that way, the binary obviously gives

the impression that the health department prohibited New Yorkers from touching one

body part but permitted them to touch another.2 In practice, however, the department

could only discourage one form of self-touching while promoting the relative safety of

another. Thus, rather than legislating personal hygiene, the recommendations

depended on New Yorkers to make sound judgments for the sake of personal and public

health.

3 Now note that, in the health department’s original formulation, each half of the binary

was actually asymmetrical rather than oppositional. On the one hand, the department’s

face-touching guideline was issued as a negative imperative (“Do not touch”) only to be

followed by a caveat (“unless you recently washed your hands”). On the other hand, its

masturbation advice was delivered not as a positive imperative (Do touch) but as a

preference whose comparative safety could be enhanced (“especially if you wash your

hands”). In other words, the guidelines identified acceptable circumstances under which

to touch the face and optimal conditions under which to touch the genitals. In so doing,

they called upon New Yorkers to make subtle adjustments to their hygiene.

4 Finally, observe that the binary reverses conventional wisdom. Prior to the pandemic,

most New Yorkers probably never gave face touching a second thought. Yet, in the

pandemic’s early days, not only health departments but also media outlets repeatedly

advised individuals to refrain from touching their faces. A case in point is The New York

Times, a local newspaper with a global audience.3 In March 2020, The Times published a

number of articles on face touching and handwashing. For instance, the article “Stop

Touching Your Face!” reported that we indulge in the “habit” at an “alarming” rate

(Parker-Pope 2020). If that recommendation made a previously innocuous practice

objectionable, the opposite was the case for the other recommendation, given its

historic context. Just a few centuries ago, the body was described as a closed system of

circulating fluids in delicate balance. Upsetting that balance, masturbators subjected

their bodies to disease and, in the process, undermined society’s procreative goals

(Preciado 2018: 82-5). Long since liberated from its association with illness,

masturbation still remains a strangely furtive practice even to this day.4 Thus, when the

guidelines cautioned against one form of self-touching but promoted the relative

safeness of another, they prompted New Yorkers to revise their predispositions

towards those two body parts.

5 Viewed from those three angles, New York City’s coronavirus-prevention measures

come into greater focus. In reshaping residents’ relationship to their bodies, the

measures arguably contributed to a new permutation of biopower. Although this essay

attends exclusively to the biopolitical stakes of the department’s self-touching and

handwashing guidelines, its insights apply more generally to the larger set of

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worldwide public-health recommendations issued during the pandemic.5 After

outlining the features of biopower at stake, this essay examines the injunction against

touching in Sigmund Freud’s theory of obsessional neurosis. Although Freud’s account

harks back to an earlier stage in biopower’s history, it nevertheless provides a

repertoire, albeit limited, of potential critical and creative responses to public-health

guidelines. In search of responses that move beyond obsessional neurosis even as they

recall some of its symptoms, this essay turns to the queer community: gay and bisexual

men who incorporated and rewrote pandemic-era precautions in several pornographic

videos. These productions reveal that, even during a public-health crisis, individuals

challenged corporeal restrictions while inventing new ways to move and express their

bodies.

Section 1: Biopower

6 To understand the biopolitics of public-health guidelines in New York and beyond, we

must first delineate the specific characteristics of biopower at stake. Emerging as early

as the seventeenth century, as Foucault recounts (1990: 139-40), biopower eventually

comprised both the government of the body and the administration of the population.

Following World War II, as several recent theorists have explained, discipline by

external apparatuses such as prisons began to recede, though not disappear, as power

reached beyond those structures in new “societies of control.” In contemporary control

societies such as ours, new corporeal and representational technologies, including

genetic engineering and digital technology, dominate the biopolitical field as power

pervades our bodies even down to our molecules (Hardt and Negri 2000: 22-4; Preciado

2013: 76-9; Rose 2007: 11-5, 223).6 As Nikolas Rose argues (2007: 3), contemporary “vital

politics,” or biopolitics, “is concerned with our growing capacities to control, manage,

engineer, reshape, and modulate the very vital capacities of human beings as living

creatures.” Those capacities include sexuality. Indeed, since World War II, technologies

such as mass-market pornography, hormone treatments, and Viagra have regulated

sexual pleasure, modified gender, and enhanced erections, respectively (Preciado 2013:

25-36).

7 It takes little effort, in light of the previous account, to recognize New York’s public-

health recommendations as a manifestation of biopower. After all, the guidelines urged

residents to care for specific body parts in order to reduce coronavirus transmission

throughout the population. Still, faces, genitals, and hands reside at the molar rather

than at the molecular level. Using those levels, Rose (2007: 11-5) distinguishes an

enzyme from an arm, for example, and a genetic experiment from an exercise regime.

While molar interventions characterized 19th-century biopolitics, now biopower

typically aims at the molecular level (11-2). Such a scalar difference suggests that the

department’s recommendations harked back to an earlier manifestation of biopower.

Nevertheless, we can recall instances in which small- and large-scale measures have

worked in tandem. For example, when SARS broke out a couple of decades ago, the

health community rushed to identify its molecular makeup while recommending

quarantines, travel bans, and similar large-scale strategies (Rose 2007: 13). And, for all

the small-scale technologies that characterize biopower today, “[a] sexuality always

implies,” Paul B. Preciado contends (2013: 46), “a precise governing of the mouth, hand,

anus, vagina.” One way that biopower regulates body parts is to divide them, their

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features, and their actions along strict gender lines. For example, according to

conventional gender codes, white heterosexual men are characterized, in part, by

“dirty hands” (Preciado 2013: 121)—a code reactivated in a pandemic-era New York

Times article entitled “Where Women Are ahead of Men: Hand Washing” (Krueger

2020).

8 If this meeting point of the molar and the molecular were not enough to qualify self-

touching and handwashing as renewed biopolitical concerns, the fact that one’s hands

could potentially transmit the coronavirus implicated them in molecular processes.

After all, health departments around the world issued handwashing recommendations

presumably because individuals never knew if they might touch something or someone

infected with the virus. For that reason, individuals took charge of their health and, in

so doing, strived to meet the expectations of “biological citizenship.” As Rose explains

(2007: 25), “biological citizenship” “maximiz[es] […] lifestyle, potential, health, and

quality of life” while casting “negative judgements […] toward those who will not […]

adopt an active, informed, positive, and prudent relation to the future.” Embracing that

duty, many individuals in New York and beyond washed their hands and expected from

others the same in return.

Section 2: Obsessional Neurosis

9 Although New Yorkers and others worldwide had been invited to renew their

dedication to “biological citizenship,” they undoubtedly lived out that commitment in

different ways. To explore potential responses to the body’s biopolitical regulation, we

turn first to Sigmund Freud. This recourse to Freud would seem both promising and

problematic. On the one hand, he provides one of the most extensive, culturally

resonant discussions of touch. In Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety and Totem and Taboo,

Freud (1989a: 48-9; 1989b: 35) claims that the obsessional neurotic’s quintessential

symptom is the prohibition against touching. On the other hand, he is situated at a

much earlier, pre-World War II moment in biopower’s history. According to Foucault

(1990: 158-9), Freud’s theories of sexuality emerged at a pivotal moment in the history

of biopower. Yet, even at that juncture, Freud harked back to an earlier invocation of

the Law in an effort to distinguish his theory from racist eugenics (149-50). Although

the Law still operates in 21st-century Western cultures, it cannot fully account for the

other subtle, insidious ways in which biopower promotes and regulates knowledge

about, pleasure from, and movement of particular body parts. That historical limitation

notwithstanding, Freud can still assist our investigation into COVID-19 precautions. His

account of obsessional neurosis enumerates several symptomatic acts, which are

essentially ways to manage desire and prohibition. By following the curious logics of

those symptoms, we can arrive at an inventory, however limited for our historical

juncture, of potential ways of responding to coronavirus-prevention measures.

10 Let us begin with the prohibition against touching, the obsessional neurotic’s

foundational symptom. That prohibition, which concerns touching objects as well as

both self and others, typically derives from the childhood injunction against

masturbation (Freud 1989a: 40-1, 48-9; 1989b: 35, 37). From the original site of the

genitals, that prohibition can easily undergo displacement from one object or person to

another until all things onto which the obsessional displaces that injunction become

sources of potential contamination—“till,” that is, “the whole world lies under an

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embargo of ‘impossibility’” (Freud 1989b: 35). Imagine a scenario in which the

obsessional neurotic begins with a prohibition against touching the genitals and

displaces that injunction onto the face. Thanks to that displacement, an otherwise

innocent face-touching activity such as scratching would fall under interdiction. That

displacement works because of longstanding cultural affinities between masturbating

and scratching (Connor 2004: 236-40). Like masturbation, which was once associated

with illness, scratching is often considered a symptom of disease (232). And just as

masturbation impedes civilization’s procreative goals, scratching undermines civilized

behavior. According to Steven Connor (2004: 231), in a passage strikingly analogous to

the one from Preciado quoted above, “hygiene and health require […] channelling the

contacts between mouth, hand, anus, penis, vulva, scalp, feet, armpit.” While Connor

attributes “[t]he regularization of these self-contacts” to “the codes of modern social

politeness” (231), Preciado has taught us to recognize in that regulation biopower at

work.

11 The hypothetical case outlined above obviously concerns the same two body parts as

coronavirus-prevention measures. However, the example and the guidelines are

nonetheless different. Rather than proscribing forms of self-touching, as we saw in

obsessional neurosis, the guidelines promoted the comparative safety of masturbation

over other sex practices while generally counselling against face touching. This

difference underscores the point, conceded above, that Freud’s theory of obsessional

neurosis and the health department’s guidelines stem from two different moments in

biopower’s history. Whereas Freud’s account oscillated between instinct and taboo, the

guidelines invited New Yorkers to calibrate their personal hygiene according to

prudent and unwise choices as well as optimal and acceptable practices. Despite that

historical divergence, we should not suspend our review of obsessional neurosis, for the

obsessional neurotic’s often clever methods for circumventing prohibition can still

inspire pandemic-era action.

12 All of those methods emerge from the ongoing tug-of-war between prohibition and

desire in the obsessional neurotic’s psychical life. To illustrate, let us return to the

classic example of childhood masturbation. Once a parent or some other authority

prohibits genital touching, that injunction only represses the desire to touch without

destroying it. As a result, neither prohibition nor desire goes away (Freud 1989b: 37-8).

Certainly, that much is common sense. As one pandemic-era New York Times article

reported, the more we are asked not to touch our faces with our hands, the more we

want to do so (Parker-Pope 2020). The conflict between prohibition and desire can last

only so long, however. Eventually, the obsessional neurotic must achieve some

satisfaction.

13 One solution is, of course, transgression, and probably many individuals living during

the coronavirus pandemic transgressed the recommendation against face touching. Yet

outright transgression has limited value, as Freud (1989b: 39-45) suggests in comparing

obsessional prohibitions to “primaeval” taboos. In cultures in which those taboos are

operative, transgression threatens the social order and requires reparation in the form

of a renouncement, such as a loss of freedom. Like individuals in those cultures,

pandemic-era individuals could not risk transgressing face-touching and handwashing

recommendations, not to mention social-distancing and mask-wearing protocols. To do

so would have undermined their status as “biological citizens.” Even if they had been

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willing to forego that status, they might have faced (not so) friendly reminders, dirty

looks, and even fines—all actions designed to restrict bodily movement.

14 Obsessional neurotics have at their disposal subtler strategies than transgression. Some

obsessionals follow a prohibition only to undo it with a subsequent act, thereby

effectively cancelling both actions. The second act comes dangerously close to, but

usually stops short of, the original, prohibited desire (Freud 1989a: 37-8, 45-6). Other

obsessionals engage in ceremonials, which allow a prohibition to be suspended but not

annulled. Unlike a cancellation, however, a ceremonial can come before or after a

prohibited act as a precaution or an expiation, respectively (Freud 1989a: 37, 46; 1989b:

36-7). For instance, obsessional neurotics would likely wash their hands before

touching their faces or after turning dirty doorknobs. In fact, as Freud explains (1989a:

20), obsessionals usually take special pride in their diligent cleanliness. However, when

circumstances prevent them from washing their hands, they often erupt in anxiety

(75).

15 Finally, the obsessional neurotic seeks satisfaction in substitution. A substitution

results from the obsessional’s need for some “discharge”—a resonant word in a

discussion about masturbation—to reduce the “tension” between instinct and

prohibition. Reaching a “compromise” between those two forces, a substitution gives

the repressed desire some fulfillment even as it betrays the obsessional’s abiding guilt

(Freud 1989a: 44; 1989b: 39). In some instances, as Freud explains (1989b: 39), “these

obsessive acts fall more and more under the sway of the instinct and approach nearer

and nearer to the activity which was originally prohibited.” To illustrate, consider

another version of the scenario above. While some obsessionals might displace onto

their faces the original prohibition against genital touching, other obsessionals might

scratch their faces as a substitute for that desire. For itching is, according to Connor

(2004: 230), a “sometimes ecstatic sensation.” “Precisely because the scratching of an

itch is so consummate a pleasure,” he explains, “it is in fact infinite, unfinishable. Once

you begin to itch and scratch, there is no end to it” (236). If, given its orgasmic-like

pleasure, face scratching too eventually falls under an injunction, obsessional neurotics

would likely find another substitute. For example, they might follow the advice, offered

in one New York Times article, to squeeze a stress ball (Gross 2020).

16 All in all, Freud’s analysis of obsessional neurosis offers a rich but ultimately limited

repertoire of potential responses to the biopolitical regulation of self-touching.

Transgression overturns prohibition only to face new restrictions, while both

cancellation and substitution arrive, albeit by different paths, just steps away from the

prohibited desire. If “biological citizenship” was the goal, as it presumably was for

many individuals living during the pandemic, cancellation and substitution, not to

mention transgression, would undercut that status. To reinforce that standing, only a

ceremonial such as handwashing would seem to offer some promise, as it temporarily

satisfies the instinct before reinstalling the prohibition. However, like the other

actions, a ceremonial remains caught in a cycle of desire and prohibition. That cycle,

characteristic of an earlier moment in biopower’s history, persists in the early 21st

century but only as a residual element.7

17 Given those limitations, we are left with two sets of questions. First, what other

responses to coronavirus-prevention measures existed in the early days of the

pandemic? Those responses could potentially incorporate obsessional symptoms. After

all, even if the interplay between instinct and prohibition is no longer a dominant

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35

feature of our culture, obsessional themes have not disappeared. New York City’s

coronavirus-prevention guidelines are a case in point. Second, must all “biological

citizens” come from the same mold? If, as Rose explains (2007: 40), the current

biopolitical field has “opened up” our bodies “to experimentation and to contestation,”

we should anticipate responses that take “biological citizenship” in unanticipated

directions. With both sets of questions in mind, the following section seeks fresh

options for pandemic-era biopolitical practice. In so doing, it finally parts ways with

Freud (1989a: 45-6), who uses the curious phrase “negative magic” to describe the

obsessional neurotic’s habit of cancelling an act of prohibition with another act. In

contrast, this section gives priority to affirmation over repudiation: to expressions of

corporeality that trouble public-health recommendations without disavowing them

altogether.

Section 3: Critical and Creative Action

18 Paul B. Preciado provides us with the theoretical tools for imagining “positive magic”

during the pandemic era. In Testo Junkie, Preciado (2013: 41) coins the term “‘orgasmic

force’” to refer to “the (real or virtual) strength of a body’s (total) excitation.” Everyone

“possesses this masturbatory potentiality,” this “power to produce molecular joy” (47).

While biopower attempts to control “orgasmic force,” no one and nothing, not even

biopower, can ever completely contain or exhaust that bodily potential (41-50). As it

evades biopower, “orgasmic force” takes shape as “practices of intentional self-

experimentation” (363). In the process, it seizes the period’s dominant “biocodes”—the

“discursive,” “visual,” and other means of subject production—and turns them against

“the somato-semiotic norm” (380, 364). As a result, “the technoliving body” becomes

part of “a biopolitical archive,” a collective resource for ongoing invention (395, 389).

Only in turning the body into such a site of resistance can we create new “biopolitical

fictions” as well as “new technologies of the production of subject” (352, 364).

19 Consider, for example, Preciado’s discussion of gloves, foreskin rings, and other anti-

masturbation apparatuses in Countersexual Manifesto. From the mid-19th to the early 20th

century, manufacturers designed those apparatuses to prevent individuals from

touching their genitals (2018: 85-8). Even today, gloves are recommended to individuals

who cannot stop touching themselves. In fact, a recent New York Times article advised

readers to wear gloves to remind themselves not to touch their faces (Parker-Pope

2020). This striking parallel between two eras, linked by way of gloves, demonstrates

that these three body parts—genitals, hands, and face—have long commanded

biopower’s attention. Although technologies, both past and present, have sought to

restrain “orgasmic force,” any such technology can be “reappropriated by different

bodies, reversed, and put to different uses, giving rise to other pleasures and other

identity positions” (Preciado 2018: 88). As Preciado explains (2018: 88-9), foreskin rings,

designed originally to prevent men from masturbating, have since been repurposed. By

mid-20th century, gay men and male S&M practitioners pierced their foreskin with

rings to achieve an enhancement of, rather than a deterrent to, erection and orgasm.

20 It is no accident that Preciado has turned to the queer community for theoretical and

political inspiration. In fact, members of that community have long engaged in

biopolitics. Starting in the late 1980s, as Preciado explains (2013: 335-41), numerous

groups—from AIDS activists and gender theorists to sex-worker advocates and post-

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porn artists—have mobilized against various forms of political and economic injustice

as well as normative representations of gender and sexuality. A case in point is the art

and activism of gay men, who were targeted by health and homophobic discourse in

the earliest years of that period’s public-health crisis. Writing about “gay male

performative practices” in the early 1990s, David Román (1992: 208, 213) called for art

that contested hegemonic depictions of male homosexuality, including the correlation

found in mainstream theater between gay, on the one hand, and AIDS and death, on the

other. Such an alternative aesthetic would ideally aspire to “produce a chaotic

multiplicity of representations […] that displace, by the very process of proliferation,

the authority of a conservative ideology of sexual hegemony, AIDS myths, and aesthetic

practices” (218).

21 Given that legacy from one public-health crisis, we should expect to find queer

responses to the current one. In our search, we should be attentive to two features of

any performative act. According to Judith Butler (1988: 521), “the body is always an

embodying of possibilities both conditioned and circumscribed by historical

convention.” From that perspective, a pandemic-era performative act would

potentially stage certain public-health precautions, which would in turn limit the

terms of that performance. And yet, while one may be “implicated in the very relations

of power [one] seeks to rival,” as Butler (1993: 241) explains elsewhere, one is never

“reducible to those dominant forms.” Thus, resistance always emerges from “resources

inevitably impure” (241). In that spirit, this essay now turns to a set of amateur

pornographic videos produced by gay and bisexual men. Obviously, pandemic-era

biopolitical resistance was not limited to gay and bisexual men. Nevertheless, their

output offers a revealing case study for this investigation.

22 The import of pornography is, from the outset, conflicted. On the one hand, individuals

who create and post pornographic videos are unwittingly subject to the very power

that their activity might otherwise seem to resist. As Tim Dean argues (2014: 9), “To

participate in […] online porn […] is to be constantly disclosing information about one’s

desire and thus to be working within the regulatory deployment of sexuality.” On the

other hand, the regulatory power to which pornographers submit cannot entirely

subsume their productions. “By exposing the libidinal investments that a given regime

prefers to keep out of sight,” Dean explains, “porn archives may disrupt the dominant

narrative, even as they also may consolidate the deployment of sexuality by tracking

and molding their subjects’ desires” (11). In undermining hegemonic fictions,

pornography moves beyond gender and sexuality, narrowly construed. “Indeed,” as

Dean argues, “pornography offers evidence about a whole gamut of social issues and

desires by showing us things that otherwise tend to remain imperceptible” (9).

23 The same can be said of videos posted to Pornhub, an online repository of pornographic

videos uploaded by amateurs and professionals around the world. According to its

published statistics, Pornhub enjoyed a surge in international visitors at the end of

March 2020 with site traffic remaining high throughout the spring. During roughly the

same period, also peaking in March, site visitors frequently searched for coronavirus

porn. In fact, by the end of May, Pornhub had hosted over 1100 videos with coronavirus

themes and over 9200 with quarantine themes (“Coronavirus Update—May 26” 2020).

Although those themes were relevant to individuals around the world, New Yorkers

were particularly well-positioned to partake of this new pornographic genre. In 2018,

they headed the list of the site’s heaviest visitors by city (“Pornhub’s Top 20 Cities”

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2019), and by March 2020, New York State residents were the second most likely users

in the United States to search for coronavirus porn (“Coronavirus Insights” 2020).

Regardless of their location, viewers were exposed to options for incorporating

coronavirus-prevention measures into everyday practice.

24 Of the hundreds of relevant videos posted to Pornhub, four emerged as the most

compelling examples for this essay in light of their performers’ identities as well as

their themes and classification. In fact, the selected videos, three of which were posted

in spring 2020, form a relatively unified subset. The videos’ amateur performers

identified as males “Interested in” “Guys” or “Guys and Girls.” Three of the videos were

categorized as “Gay” and titled and/or tagged with covid or a related term. All four

videos featured handwashing or a substitute, while two staged masturbation.

Obviously, both of those themes figured prominently in New York’s coronavirus-

prevention guidelines. However, the following analysis makes no claim of influence—of

guidelines on performers or of videos on viewers. Instead, it illustrates that these

videos combined a worldwide health guideline (handwashing) with a common sex

practice (masturbation) during a period when, regardless of the specific

recommendations in effect locally, individuals had been invited to reconsider whom

and what they touched under what conditions of cleanliness. Thus, while under any

other circumstance a pornographic video featuring masturbation might be considered

banal, during the pandemic’s early months, such a video acquired new meanings

specifically for New Yorkers and generally for others worldwide, for whom cleaning

and touching had become heightened concerns. The videos exposed those potential

viewers to options for incorporating coronavirus-prevention measures into creative

and critical practice.8

25 “Amateur POV Handwashing Demo HD 60FPS,” a video produced by BuddyBurbank, a

man from Buffalo, staged the obsessional neurotic’s favorite ceremonial.9 Like similar

videos posted to Pornhub, this one resembled pandemic-era handwashing

demonstrations, popular in New York City and beyond (e.g., “How to Wash Your Hands”

2020). Over the course of this one-minute video, the performer turns on the faucet and

reaches for the soap, then lathers and scrubs his hands, and finally turns off the faucet

and dries his hands all while the screen reads “Scrub for at least 20 seconds!!!” On the

face of it, this video conforms exactly to the period’s handwashing recommendations.

Thus, it hardly serves as an example of political resistance.

26 If BuddyBurbank’s production adheres to handwashing protocols, Kinkyguy-20’s video

reinterprets them.10 In “How to Wash Your Hands with Pee! Covid Disinfection !)” the

performer, a man from Moscow, approaches a bathroom sink with his exposed penis,

urinates into the sink, cups his hands to catch the urine, and, for approximately twenty

seconds, washes his hands with it. While the video is not overtly erotic, the fact that it

implicitly invokes the watersports practiced in some gay circles nevertheless sexualizes

the video’s handwashing instructions. It would seem, at first glance, that those

instructions invite viewers to dirty rather than to clean their hands. Such advice would

undoubtedly upset the classic obsessional neurotic, who becomes anxious whenever he

cannot properly clean his hands. However, Kinkyguy-20’s handwashing technique does

not so much oppose conventional hygiene as it finds an alternative way to follow that

standard. After all, the public-health guideline, in its colloquial rendition, simply stated

“Wash your hands” without always specifying “with soap and water.” Showing

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satisfaction with his unorthodox reinterpretation, the performer examines his hands at

the end of the video and gives himself two thumbs up.

27 The next two videos under examination showcase the classic solo sex act. Consider,

first of all, “Covid-19 Cumming Huge Load Lots of Lube Stroking My Big Cock Sensual,”

a video posted by ethanmcnab, a man from California.11 The performer begins this

video by masturbating with each hand at turns, applying lubricant in the process.

Approximately four minutes into the video, he puts a blue latex glove on his left hand,

reapplies lubricant a few times, and continues to masturbate with his left hand until

ejaculation. The video’s action sits uneasily with the period’s health guidelines. Since

the video is our sole evidence, we do not know if the performer washes his hands

before and after masturbating. We do know that he puts on a glove, but his glove use is

ambiguous. If he wears the glove as a substitute for handwashing, as the video’s title

might suggest, he does so too late and against the advice of major health organizations

(e.g., “When to Wear Gloves” 2020). It is also possible, of course, that he wears the glove

as a sexual enhancement. Either way, the performer parts ways with the obsessional

neurotic. Typically, the latter performs a ceremonial such as handwashing before or

after touching a forbidden object. Such a precaution or expiation permits a prohibition

to be momentarily lifted without being permanently annulled. If the performer

substitutes a glove for soap and water, he turns glove wearing and masturbating into

two simultaneous rather than two successive gestures. Moreover, unlike the

obsessional’s ceremonial, which compensates for transgression, the glove may intensify

masturbation as much as it shields the performer from potential contamination.

28 We can further assess the significance of ethanmcnab’s departures from the obsessional

norm by comparing his video to SylvanusXXX’s. Dated March 26, 2020, “Containment

Days 10: Washing Cock” opens by explaining, in French and English on the screen, that

the performer will create videos to occupy himself during France’s lockdown. After that

explanation, the performer lathers his flaccid penis with soap, strokes his eventually

erect penis, reapplies the soap a couple of times, and rinses his penis with water from

the faucet. Afterwards he gently dries his penis with a towel. For this performer,

washing (or a substitute) is not an action performed before and after masturbating (as

separate acts performed successively) or while masturbating (as separate acts

performed simultaneously). Instead, washing and masturbating are one and the same

act—so much so that the viewer never knows for certain if the performer actually

ejaculates. His semen, if any, seamlessly blends with the white lather. Thus, this

performance takes to its logical conclusion Freud’s “law of neurotic illness”: the law

according to which “obsessive acts […] approach nearer and nearer to the activity

which was originally prohibited” (1989b: 39). Here symptom and desire, at last, are one.

It is true, of course, that, by washing his penis with his hands, the performer effectively

washes his hands as well. Therefore, one could argue that, for all intents and purposes,

the performer follows handwashing protocol. However, the video’s subtitle makes clear

that handwashing, to whatever degree it occurs, is only incidental. The video’s true

focus is, instead, the performer’s penis. Indeed, the performer reminds us, in caring for

a body part that came under scrutiny during the pandemic, that it too deserves

attention, the kind that a public-health recommendation can never dictate.

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Conclusion

29 The Pornhub performers in the videos analyzed above proved that creation can come

out of crisis. Despite coronavirus-prevention measures—or, perhaps, because of them—

these men invented new and sometimes unexpected ways to express their bodies.

Surely, they were not alone. Indeed, while this essay has focused exclusively on a

particular subpopulation, we should turn to other instances of biopolitical action both

inside and outside the queer community. That examination might point to possibilities

for corporeal expression once the pandemic has passed. Perhaps handwashing, mask

wearing, and social distancing will play roles in post-pandemic sex practices. And while

this essay has also concentrated on specific guidelines, we should investigate others

that have surfaced during the pandemic. For example, what forms of personal style

have been afforded by mask wearing? Such an investigation might reveal the degree to

which individuals living during the pandemic have balanced social responsibility and

personal freedom, redefining “biological citizenship” while expressing their bodies

critically and creatively. Wherever we turn for future lines of inquiry, we should expect

discourses and practices to evolve—and even to evaporate—rapidly. Indeed, this

project, started in the earliest months of the pandemic and completed a year later, has

faced the ephemeral nature of cultural production many times. “Since porn is regarded

as ephemera,” as Dean explains (2014: 11), “the conditions that facilitate its

archivization remain so contingent […] as to make its preservation seem miraculous.”

His point could easily apply to other internet-based artefacts on which this study has

drawn. Despite those challenges, we should nevertheless persist even in a post-

pandemic world that will likely require our collective creativity and test our mutual

resolve.

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www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/opinion/sunday/pornhub-rape-trafficking.html

Krueger, Alyson. “Where Women Are ahead of Men: Hand Washing.” The New York Times,

17 March 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/us/women-men-hand-washing-

coronavirus.html

NYC Health. “Sex and Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19).” 21 March 2020. UNAIDS, https://

hivpreventioncoalition.unaids.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/NYCHealth_Sex-and-

Coronavirus-Disease-2019-COVID-19_March2020.pdf

“Our Commitment to Trust and Safety.” Pornhub, https://help.pornhub.com/hc/en-us/

categories/360002934613-Our-Commitment-to-Trust-and-Safety

Parker-Pope, Tara. “Stop Touching Your Face!” The New York Times, 2 March 2020, https://

www.nytimes.com/2020/03/02/well/live/coronavirus-spread-transmission-face-touching-

hands.html

“Pornhub’s Top 20 Cities.” Pornhub Insights, 21 May 2019, https://www.pornhub.com/insights/

top-20-cities

Preciado, Paul B. An Apartment on Uranus: Chronicles of the Crossing. Trans. Charlotte Mandell.

Kindle Ed. South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e), 2020.

Preciado, Paul B. Countersexual Manifesto. Trans. Kevin Gerry Dunn. New York: Columbia UP, 2018.

NYPL, https://nypl.overdrive.com/media/3996386

Preciado, Paul B. Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era. Trans.

Bruce Benderson. New York: Feminist Press, 2013. [First published in 2008 under the name

Beatriz Preciado.]

Román, David. “Performing All Our Lives: AIDS, Performance, Community.” In Critical Theory and

Performance. Eds. Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach. Ann Arbor, MI: U of Michigan P, 1992.

208-21.

Rose, Nikolas. The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century.

Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton UP, 2007.

SylvanusXXX. “Containment Days 10: Washing Cock.” Pornhub, https://www.pornhub.com/

view_video.php?viewkey=ph5e7e241b991f1. Accessed 26 May 2020.

SylvanusXXX. SylvanusXXX Pornhub Profile. Pornhub, https://www.pornhub.com/model/

sylvanusxxx

Tracy, Marc. “The New York Times Tops 6 Million Subscribers As Ad Revenue Plummets.” The New

York Times, 6 May 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/06/business/media/new-york-times-

earnings-subscriptions-coronavirus.html

“When to Wear Gloves.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 16 July 2020, https://

www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prevent-getting-sick/gloves.html

Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1990.

NOTES

1. New York City’s health department updated its webpages while I conducted my research on

this essay. Hence my need here and at the end of the paragraph to cite the guidelines by way of

Angles, 12 | 2021

42

other sites, which continued to post earlier versions. While the first set of guidelines was not

dated on the other site, circumstantial evidence suggests that it was issued early March, the same

month that the second set was issued.

2. Here and in the next paragraph, I loosely adapt language that Foucault (2007: 5-6) uses to

distinguish a “legal code,” which operates in terms of “the permitted” and “the prohibited,” from

security, which gauges the “optimal” and the “acceptable.” Security is, for Foucault in this

context, a close synonym of biopower. The guidelines under examination are, as I will soon assert,

a manifestation of biopower.

3. Considering that The Times reported an increase in online readers during March 2020 to 240

million unduplicated individuals worldwide, its articles provide especially apt examples here and

throughout this essay (Tracy 2020).

4. In “Manhandling the Body: A Foucauldian Approach” (2021), I discuss the history of

masturbation, as recounted by Foucault, and paraphrase the same point from Foucault in the

next section. “Manhandling the Body” uses Foucault’s concepts knowledge, power, and

subjectivity as a lens through which to examine a masturbation-only, New York-based sex club as

a site of resistance.

5. See, for example, the World Health Organization’s guidelines (“Coronavirus Disease [COVID-19]

Advice for the Public” 2020), which encouraged handwashing and discouraged face touching.

6. Hardt and Negri, Preciado, and Rose derive the term “societies of control” from Deleuze (1992).

7. I borrow the term residual and, in the next paragraph, dominant from Williams (1990: 121-7),

who distinguishes residual and emergent from dominant characteristics of a culture in a particular

historical period.

8. Between conducting research for this essay and preparing it for publication, one of the

originally selected videos was disabled probably by its performer while three others were marked

by the site for verification. The latter action resulted from new measures that Pornhub

implemented after a New York Times report alleged that some of the site’s videos featured minors

and non-consenting adults (Kristof 2020). (See “Our Commitment to Trust and Safety” for the

site’s new verification process.) Although I had no reason to believe that the original videos

featured minors or non-consenting adults, I later substituted videos categorized as “Verified

Amateurs” for the three videos pending verification. The disabled video, which I retained, was

uploaded by SylvanusXXX, whose Pornhub profile now indicates that he has been verified. The

subset is now less unified than, but still comparable to, the original one. Major deviations from

the subset’s common features will be noted below. Here and below, the performers’ location and

sexual orientation come from their Pornhub profiles unless otherwise noted; information about

the videos’ tags, categories, and posting dates comes from the pages on which the videos were

uploaded. Pornhub does not provide exact posting dates, so the ones given here are only

approximate.

9. Although this video was neither tagged nor titled covid or a related term, its theme along with

its spring 2020 posting arguably qualifies it as coronavirus porn. And although it was not posted

to the gay category, the performer’s other videos on his profile page were posted to that category

as of this writing.

10. Although posted in fall 2020, this video is virtually identical to a spring 2020 video originally

chosen for this project.

11. The performer’s location comes from his Modelhub page, linked to his Pornhub profile.

Angles, 12 | 2021

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ABSTRACTS

This essay examines two sets of coronavirus-prevention guidelines issued by New York City’s

health department in early spring 2020. The department advised residents not to touch their

faces “unless” they had washed their hands but advised them to masturbate “especially if” they

had washed their hands. Those recommendations reshaped New Yorkers’ relationship to their

bodies and, in so doing, contributed to a new permutation of biopower. Drawing on several

theories of biopower, this essay’s first section explains that the department’s recommendations

used large-scale biopolitical tactics with small-scale implications to encourage New Yorkers to

meet the expectations of what Nikolas Rose has called “biological citizenship.” Exploring

potential responses to the body’s biopolitical regulation, this essay’s second section considers the

prohibition against touching in Sigmund Freud’s outdated but culturally resonant theory of

obsessional neurosis. While obsessional neurosis may transgress, cancel, or achieve a

compromise with that prohibition, only a ceremonial such as handwashing offers promise for

responsible action. However, it, like the obsessional’s other actions, operates in a cycle of desire

and prohibition which cannot fully account for how biopower now promotes and regulates bodily

knowledge and movement. In search of alternatives, this essay’s final section turns to four

coronavirus-themed pornographic videos produced by gay and bisexual men. These videos

troubled public-health guidelines while providing potential viewers in New York and beyond

with critical and creative options for pandemic-era action. In sum, these productions revealed

that creation can come out of crisis.

Cet article examine deux séries de directives de prévention concernant le coronavirus émises par

le Service de santé de la ville de New York au début du printemps 2020. Le service a conseillé aux

habitants de ne pas se toucher le visage "à moins" de s'être lavé les mains, mais leur a conseillé

de se masturber "surtout" s'ils se sont lavés les mains. Ces recommandations ont redéfini la

relation des New-Yorkais avec leur corps et, ce faisant, ont contribué à une nouvelle mutation du

biopouvoir. S'appuyant sur plusieurs théories du biopouvoir, la première section de cet article

montre que les recommandations du service de santé ont fait appel à des tactiques biopolitiques

à grande échelle avec des implications à petite échelle pour encourager les New-Yorkais à

répondre aux attentes de ce que Nikolas Rose a appelé la "citoyenneté biologique". Explorant les

réponses potentielles à la régulation biopolitique du corps, la deuxième section de cet article

examine l'interdiction du toucher dans la théorie de la névrose obsessionnelle de Sigmund Freud,

une théorie dépassée mais qui résonne dans la culture. Si la névrose obsessionnelle peut

transgresser, supprimer ou parvenir à un compromis avec cette interdiction, seul un cérémonial

tel que le lavage des mains offre la promesse d'une action responsable. Cependant, ce cérémonial,

comme les autres actions de la névrose obsessionnelle, opère dans un cycle de désir et

d'interdiction qui ne peut rendre pleinement compte de la manière dont le biopouvoir promeut

et régule aujourd'hui la connaissance du corps et son mouvement. À la recherche d'alternatives,

la dernière section de cet article se tourne vers quatre vidéos pornographiques sur le thème du

coronavirus produites par des hommes gays ou bisexuels. Ces vidéos ont remis en question les

directives de santé publique tout en offrant aux spectateurs potentiels de New York et d'ailleurs

des options critiques et créatives pour agir à l'ère de la pandémie. En somme, ces productions ont

révélé que la crise peut engendrer la créativité.

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INDEX

Keywords: coronavirus, COVID-19, pandemic, New York City, touch, body, biopower, biopolitics,

pornography, obsessional neurosis, masturbation

Mots-clés: coronavirus, COVID-19, pandémie, New York, toucher, corps, biopouvoir,

biopolitique, pornographie, névrose obsessionnelle, masturbation

AUTHOR

ERIC DAFFRON

Eric Daffron, Professor of Literature at Ramapo College of New Jersey, has published widely on

early British gothic literature and other topics. Currently, his work focuses on Michel Foucault

and on sexuality and the body. He lives in New York City. Contact: edaffron [at] ramapo.edu

Angles, 12 | 2021

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The American Government and“Total War” on COVID-19Christopher Griffin

1 It is not unusual for American administrations to declare war on an ideology

(communism), a collection of chemical products (drugs), a socioeconomic condition

(poverty), or a method of warfare (terrorism), none of which, strictly speaking, can be

singly defeated on the battlefield. Importantly, despite talk of “war”, the U.S.

government did not always mobilize all of its available national power to decisively

defeat drugs, poverty, communism or terrorism. The latest “war” by the U.S.

Government has been the “War on COVID-19.” The Trump administration employed

rhetoric aimed at the justification of extraordinary measures to fight the virus, but as

with the other examples of so-called “wars”, the U.S. Government did not actually put

the country on a war footing. As argued by Moussa Bourekba (2020), a comparison

between the other most recent war, the fight against terrorism, and the response to

COVID-19, points to a shared argument to take “exceptional measures” to win the

“war”.

2 One such exceptional measure came in April 2020, in the midst of the first wave of the

COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, when the U.S. Government sent a one-time

economic stimulus check of $1,200 to every adult American (U.S. Treasury 2020).1 Along

with the check, the Trump Administration sent a letter to all Americans, in both

English and in Spanish, signed by the President (Figure 1).

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Figure 1: Letter by Donald Trump accompanying the April 2020 stimulus check

Source: https://edition.cnn.com/world/live-news/coronavirus-pandemic-04-26-20-intl/h_eed812a34119183144c4a46ca20763f9

3 In the letter, Trump stated: “Our top priority is your health and safety. As we wage

total war on this invisible enemy, we are also working around the clock to protect

hardworking Americans like you from the consequences of the economic shutdown.”

Certain media outlets criticized the letter, arguing that it was more about his reelection

campaign than any genuine willingness to help struggling American families (Steakin

2020; Singletary 2020). Importantly, the stimulus letter represents a direct

communication from the American President to the vast majority of his constituents in

the midst of a major health crisis. In this article, I wish to focus on Trump’s use in this

letter of two highly symbolic words: “total war”.

4 Trump is known for his tendency to use hyperbole. The expression “total war” in a

letter signed by him is therefore an unlikely reference to the rich historical literature

on this concept. Instead, Trump was no doubt employing a simple rhetorical device to

indicate that a major effort was going to be made by the U.S. Government to fight the

virus. But words have a tendency to signify more than what their authors may have had

in mind, and I would like to argue that the expression warrants sustained analysis.

5 In this article, I will first examine what a “total war” against Covid might have looked

like and highlight the inappropriateness of the concept to understand American

policymaking during the pandemic, suggesting other, more appropriate terms. Given

that Trump most likely did not use the notion of “total war” as an intentional reference

to the historical literature on the subject, I will examine how the President conceived of

the fight against the virus as a “war.” I will attempt to show that the Trump

administration’s war on COVID-19 rather resembled a limited war than the two large-

scale conflicts which have been historically quoted as being “total wars”: the Civil War

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47

(1861-1865), during which the North destroyed the South to put an end to attempts at

Secession;2 and World War II, when much of America’s military and economic power

was used in its fight against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. I will contend that the

Trump Administration, likely without having read Carl von Clausewitz’s works on war,

adopted a Clausewitzian approach, holding on defensively and accepting losses while

waiting for the development of a solution (here, a vaccine). The need to protect the

economy came above all else, an approach which ran into opposition from local and

state authorities. Trump’s totalizing rhetoric also attempted, ultimately unsuccessfully,

to make a limited approach to the problem look like a larger, comprehensive effort by

the U.S. government in its fight against the virus.

6 I will then argue that despite Trump’s seemingly innocuous use of the hyperbolic

expression “total war”, the more totalitarian aspects included in this notion may have

resonated with a number of Trump’s far-right followers, thereby serving as both a

typical hyberbole and as a coded word. Trump may not have had any real intention to

launch a total war against the virus, but the idea of war may have generated a positive

reaction amongst his far-right supporters. He tweeted in 2019 about “a Civil War

fracture in this Nation” if he were to be forced to step down before the end of his term

(Warzel 2019). The possibility of a new Civil War galvanized support from certain alt-

right networks and militias in the U.S. For Justin Lane, the events of 2020, which

included Black Lives Matter protests and the claim (long before the election) that

Democrats would steal the presidential election in November, led to a situation in

which certain groups believed that they had “lost control of the United States” (Lane

2021). The fear of a takeover of the country by anti-fascist groups was already

prevalent in 2017 (Warzel 2019). Trump’s use of the concept of a “total war” against

COVID-19 may have been interpreted by his followers as the first act in this new Civil

War intended to keep Trump and his followers in power if the election was indeed

“stolen.”

7 The paper finally compares Trump’s rhetoric with that employed in other countries.

While not taking the discourse to the extremes of the Trump Administration, several

European countries also employed war metaphors to explain the anti-Covid measures

to the public. As suggested in a recent article by Elena Semino (2021), war discourse is a

way to drum up public support for major government initiatives. The French and the

British governments did not hesitate to use images of war to rally their populations

around the extended lockdowns. What differentiates both the U.S. and the United

Kingdom’s response is the framing of the conflict as a war between the economy and

the virus, rather than first and foremost as a danger to public health.

“Total War” and “Absolute War”: Definitions

8 Total war poses at least two major problems that need to be addressed before applying

it to the COVID-19 pandemic. Firstly, “total war” is most often used in a descriptive

sense to apply to the two World Wars. The use of the concept as a separate analytical

construct to create a theoretical category of conflicts is more difficult and not

necessarily useful. Secondly, “total war” remains strongly linked to the geopolitical

worldview of Nazi Germany.

9 Many scholars trace the origins of “total war” to the statements of French politicians

during World War I, in particular Georges Clemenceau, who spoke of “guerre intégrale”

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before the French Senate on November 20, 1917: “We are here before you with the sole

idea to wage a total war” (“Nous nous présentons devant vous dans l’unique pensée

d’une guerre intégrale”, Clemenceau 1917). 3 The problem is that Clemenceau made

little effort to explain what he meant. In fact, it is not at all certain that “guerre

intégrale” means “total war” and Clemenceau may have possibly used the term as a

synonym for “winning the war at all costs.”

10 The term “total war” was also used by another Frenchman, although in a

fundamentally different way from Clemenceau, when Léon Daudet published a book

entitled La Guerre Totale in 1918. Daudet was known for his anti-Semitism and was a

member of the royalist Action française (Joly 2012). His book on total war exhibits the

racist view of the concept that would later be taken up by German Field Marshal Erich

von Ludendorff and the Nazi leadership. Daudet explained the concept in his book:

“Armies fight, but so do traditions, institutions, customs, social and cultural codes,

hearts and minds…” (“Ce ne sont pas seulement les armées qui se battent, mais ce sont

aussi les traditions, les institutions, les coutumes, les codes, les esprits…”, Daudet 1918:

8) The identification of the war as part of certain “traditions” and “customs” implied

that it extended beyond a conflict between states to become a confrontation between

two races.

11 Ludendorff, commander of German forces at the end of World War I, developed the

concept of “total war” more thoroughly in the 1920s and 1930s. His theory, rooted in

his experience in the war, was essentially a critique of Carl von Clausewitz’s On War

(discussed further below). Ludendorff argued for a subordination of civil powers to the

military leadership in war so as to give the military the freedom to do what was

necessary to win (Ludendorff 1936; Coutau-Bégarie 2003: 101-2). Hervé Coutau-Bégarie

usefully sums up this theory of total war: “all political energy should be used in service

to the war conceived as the State’s ultimate goal” (“toutes les énergies de la politique

devaient être asservies aux besoins de la guerre conçue comme la finalité suprême de

l’Etat”, Coutau-Bégarie 2003: 467). The racism of Hitler’s later policies was clearly

present in Ludendorff’s work, The Nation at War, which advocated removing Jews,

Socialists and pacifists to win a future war (Shannon 2014: 188).

12 Ludendorff famously had a severe nervous breakdown on September 28, 1918, but

contemporaries claim that his judgement was already clouded by the summer of the

same year (Zabecki 2018: 60). In the 1920s, he developed a close relationship with

Hitler, which included his participation in the Beer Hall Putsch for which he was later

acquitted (Kershaw 2000a: 216). While Ludendorff later disavowed Hitler (Kershaw

2000a: 377), it is clear that the latter had already picked up the Field Marshal’s ideas

and would put them to use in World War II.

13 The Nazis pursued the concept of total war to its greatest extent. Josef Goebbels

declared “total war” in his famous speech at the Sportpalast in Berlin on February 18,

1943, affirming:

We can no longer make only partial and careless use of the war potential at homeand in the significant parts of Europe that we control. We must use our fullresources, as quickly and thoroughly as it is organizationally and practicallypossible. (Goebbels 1943)

14 This is the sense of total war that is used in contemporary strategic thought, which is

the mobilization of all available resources in a given country (Kershaw 2000b: 561-3). In

this sense, one can see how the proposed subordination of all civil concerns to the war

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effort proposed in Ludendorff’s writings was echoed by the Nazi concept of a total

mobilization of the economy and available manpower to win the war.

15 As in Ludendorff, the Nazi concept of total war had racist overtones. As Raymond Aron

pointed out, “Like Ludendorff, [Hitler] substitutes the State for the racial community as

the subject of historical destiny” (“Comme Ludendorff, [Hitler] substitue la

communauté raciale à l’Etat en tant que sujet du destin historique”, Aron 1976b: 77). It

follows that if the state is a “racial community,” total war means the removal of all

elements that threaten that race, be they external or internal. Total war then becomes

the mobilization of a racial community, itself synonymous with the state. Aron also

argued that the pretext of total war and the mobilization of the population gave Hitler

an argument to attack civilians without restraint on a large scale in occupied areas

(Aron 1976b: 129). All this should caution against using the term “total war” as a

conceptual framework to understand other wars in history.

16 Surely, President Trump’s talk of “total war” against COVID-19 was not intended to

invoke images of the Nazis when he sent out his stimulus letter, using “total” as a

rhetorical, rather than a historical, term. However, as mentioned above, it may have

been received differently by some of his far-right followers who believed in the need to

wage war against “a plot to rule America” which originated in the 1930s and was led by

“Jewish academic Marxists” (Mirrlees 2018: 56). A certain number of White Nationalists

supporting Trump have neo-Nazi sympathies, as when Richard Spencer and his

followers gave Nazi salutes at a conference in Washington DC in 2016 to celebrate

Trump’s victory (Hatiwanger 2020). Thus, the term “total war” may have been

embraced by a minority of Trump’s followers with its full Nazi, anti-Semitic, and racist

subtext.

17 Intention and reception aside, however, the term remains a problematic one, despite

its frequent use in strategic and political literature to describe, in the words of

historian Donald Stoker, a “big war” (Stoker 2016). The usefulness of total war theory

for understanding the war against COVID-19 is thus rather limited for both theoretical

and historical reasons. But there is another, perhaps more useful, concept regarding

what might be called a totalizing kind of war: Clausewitz’s notion of “absolute war.”

18 Ludendorff’s concept of “total war” was explicitly a critique of Clausewitz’s earlier

theories about the character of war. Carl von Clausewitz was a Prussian military officer

during the Napoleonic Wars who is most famous for his theoretical work, On War.4 In

the first chapter of his treatise, Clausewitz already points at the impossibility of total

war (even though his writing predated the concept by nearly a century). For

Clausewitz, “the very nature of war impedes the simultaneous concentration of all

forces” (Clausewitz 1984: 79-80). Absolute war, or the maximum use of force, is an ideal

type, and humans cannot logically go this far (Clausewitz 1984: 78; Aron 1976a: 113).

19 Clausewitz’s argument, which runs counter to that of Ludendorff and Hitler, is that

politics and the state necessarily limit the run-up to absolute war. He argues that “the

political object — the original motive for the war — will thus determine both the

military objective to be reached and the amount of effort it requires.” (Clausewitz 1984:

81) This moderation of war’s aims by the state necessarily precludes the notion of total

war, as there is always a political limit to the extremes of warfare.

20 This does not mean that Clausewitz was calling for moderation in warfare, however. In

Book 8 of On War, he openly admires Napoleon Bonaparte’s way of waging war, saying it

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50

came close to “absolute perfection” (Clausewitz 1984: 580). According to Clausewitz,

this is the closest that war came to the extremes described by theory, i.e. the maximum

employment of military forces to destroy the enemy. It would be a mistake to apply this

to other wars, however, as there are other factors that change the character of each

conflict (Clausewitz 1984: 580). Limited war, where the objective is less than total defeat

of the enemy, is possible under certain circumstances, and will be discussed further

below (Clausewitz 1984: 611-6). The Trump Administration ended up deliberately

limiting the “war” effort against COVID-19 in the way that Clausewitzian analysis

predicted.

Total War, Absolute War and COVID-19

21 How is this theoretical and historical discussion on “total” and “absolute” war useful

for understanding the fight against COVID-19? A key element is the involvement of the

civilian population in the “war” effort against the virus. This is in contrast with

Clausewitz’s theories, where military forces only target enemy military forces.5

Contariwise, the war on COVID-19 necessarily involves all types of people, as the virus

does not discriminate between its victims. Although the virus has disproportionately

affected minorities and lower-income groups within society (CDC 2021), the “enemy”

(i.e. the virus) does not target one specific national group that could mobilize all of its

forces for a counterattack.

22 An additional problem is that COVID-19 does not offer visible targets which could be

identified and defeated with military force, especially given the existence of

asymptomatic cases which have made it even more difficult to isolate virus-bearers and

eradicate contaminations (Kortepeter 2020).6 This does not mean that mobilization

against the virus is impossible, but it has to come from other sources.

23 Mobilization against the virus has involved the health sector, first and foremost:

hospitals and clinics to treat victims of the virus, and biotech companies to search for

vaccines. For New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, “This [the vaccine] is the weapon

that is going to win the war” (“COVID-19 Vaccines” 2020).

24 Total war would imply that all citizens in non-essential work be mobilized to support

the health sector (which takes up the role of the military in this “war”) to contribute to

the fight against the virus. But this did not occur, firstly because retraining the general

population to become health specialists would take a great deal of time, and secondly

because it would have exposed a greater share of the population to the virus, which

would have been counterproductive.

25 Absolute war theory might help better understand the mobilization against the virus. If

the vaccine is the war-winning weapon (one part of an arsenal including other weapons

such as masks, social distancing, lockdown measures, etc.), then maximizing resources

available for the research, development and distribution of the vaccine would be the

most likely way to defeat the enemy. At this point, Clausewitz becomes relevant. The

redistribution of resources to fight the pandemic using a vaccine would resemble the

extremes (in terms of financial and manpower output) used to develop the Manhattan

Project in World War II. This parallel was made clearly in a briefing on May 15, 2020,

when Trump explicitly compared its vaccine development program, Operation Warp

Speed, with the Manhattan Project which had developed the nuclear bomb:

Angles, 12 | 2021

51

Today I want to update you on the next stage of this momentous medical initiative. It’s called Operation Warp Speed. That means big and it means fast. A massivescientific, industrial, and logistical endeavor unlike anything our country has seensince the Manhattan Project. You could really say that nobody has seen anythinglike we’re doing, whether it’s ventilators or testing. Nobody has seen anything likewe’re doing now, within our country, since the Second World War. Incredible(2020-15-05).

This media file cannot be displayed. Please refer to the online document http://

journals.openedition.org/angles/4058

26 The implication was that the U.S. was willing to do whatever was necessary, at least on

paper, to develop the weapons necessary to defeat the virus on the “battlefield” in a

Clausewitzian sense. The reference to World War II also reinforced the contextual

overtones discussed earlier when Trump used the term “total war” in the stimulus

letter. This “incredible” mobilization only went so far, however, and the

Administration’s announcement was only really about developing weapons against the

virus, rather than actually mobilizing the entire population to fight it.

27 In fact, even if Operation Warp Speed was a large investment, it did not resemble the

national effort that went into the Manhattan Project. Operation Warp Speed invested

$12.4 billion in pharmaceutical companies to develop a vaccine. As Emily Barone (2020)

has demonstrated, this may be a high-level of spending for a single program, but it is

not unusual. The U.S. spent almost as much on relief for farmers in 2018. The

Manhattan Project, on the other hand, cost $23 billion adjusted for inflation in 2007

dollars (CTBTO 2007). The more significant contribution in monetary terms was the

economic stimulus. The U.S. Government offered $600 checks to American citizens in

2020 as well as $1400 checks to each individual (unaccompanied by letters this time) in

2021, as well as a host of other measures to support businesses. A recent estimate

claims that the U.S. spent the equivalent of 26.46% of its GDP on the stimulus packages

as of May 2021 (Statista 2021). Germany, Italy and Japan all spent relatively more on

stimulus to fight the virus.

28 A real mobilization of the whole population against the virus would likely involve

lockdowns, if it did not implicate everyone’s support of the health sector. Total war

against the virus in its pure form (regardless of its racist terms) would mean that the

people would be willing to self-isolate as long as it took, regardless of the costs to

themselves, their jobs and their ways of life. This would imply heavy economic costs for

individuals, including wage loss, job loss and the resulting hunger or want in other

goods and services (IMF 2020). The sacrifices required are considerable for the

population in general, and near-total lockdowns are most likely the closest thing to

total war in the fight against COVID-19. Lockdowns are highly unpopular, however, due

to the restrictions on civil liberties, and the hardships imposed on people, especially

women, minorities and workers whose jobs cannot be carried out from home, as noted

by the International Monetary Fund (IMF 2020: 69-73).

29 The varied implication of the population in fighting against the virus in 2020 mimicked

what had occurred a century earlier. During the influenza epidemic of 1918 and 1919,

lockdowns were implemented unevenly and for limited amounts of time in the U.S.,

despite the precedents for restrictions on liberties during the First World War.

Angles, 12 | 2021

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Responses to the virus were largely local, and far from resembling a total war (Hatchett

et al. 2007).

30 The resistance to lockdowns may also be in part due to the absence of a developed

welfare state in the U.S. An OECD (2020) report showed that the U.S. lagged behind in

job retention measures during the lockdowns in spring 2020, and even when new

measures were introduced on a state-by-state basis, people did not frequently look for

that aid.

The Trump Administration’s Strategy againstCOVID-19: A Far Cry from Total War

31 Trump’s speeches have frequently been singled out for the simplicity of their language,

intended to target the largest part of the American population as possible (Kayam

2017). In this case, “total war” meant for most people “very big war.” This rhetorical

use makes it difficult to discuss other options. For instance, when Trump stated that

the American public education system “leaves our young and beautiful students

deprived of all knowledge”, Jon Hesk showed that this did not make logical sense, by

introducing a binary and exclusionary concept. “Imagine all those high school

graduates going around literally knowing nothing at all” (Hesk 2017). The idea is that

there is education or there is none, a stark distinction implied by the totalizing use of

“all.” “Total” war may serve a similar purpose: Trump, at least rhetorically, does not

admit the possibility that military action can have its limitations or, more generally,

that American power can be limited. A war has to be “total” (again, likely meaning

“big”) to be a war at all. Trump has always been honest about his tendency to

exaggerate. In a widely quoted statement from his 1987 book The Art of the Deal, he

claimed: “People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the

most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It's an innocent form of exaggeration —

and a very effective form of promotion” (Trump and Schwartz 1987: 36).

32 Another specificity of Trump’s speeches is his taste for military terms. Albeit the

President’s relationship with the armed services has been ambiguous, alternating

between admiration and insulting wounded soldiers (Goldberg 2020), Trump often

resorts to bellicose rhetoric, and it is worthwhile discussing why he presented

COVID-19 as a military issue.

33 Early on in the crisis, in a briefing on March 18, Trump started by talking about the

“war against the Chinese virus” (2020-18-03). This was not far from a declaration of war

against China itself, and while it was not stated directly, the statement implicitly made

China responsible for the spread of the virus.7 The President then went on to talk about

the use of hospital ships by the military to help deal with the influx of COVID-19

patients. In the same briefing, Trump then invoked World War II, both to discuss the

need for sacrifices as well as to highlight the fact that military production was taken to

unprecedented levels to meet the demands of the war against COVID-19 (2020-18-03).

Then he made a statement which came close to a definition of total war a few weeks

before he issued the stimulus letter:

And now it’s our time. We must sacrifice together because we’re all in this togetherand we’ll come through together. It’s the invisible enemy. That’s always thetoughest enemy: the invisible enemy. But we’re going to defeat the invisible enemy.

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I think we’re going to do it even faster than we thought. And it will be a completevictory. It’ll be a total victory. (2020-18-03)

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34 The repeated expression “Invisible enemy” is borrowed from several sources, the most

recent being the literature on counterinsurgency warfare which identifies insurgents

as “invisible” due to their ability to blend into the rest of the population (Luttwak and

Richard 2006). The Times of Israel protested openly at the U.S. Government’s use of this

term, recalling that the term “invisible enemy” had also historically been used to

promote anti-Semitism (Jacobson 2020). As suggested earlier, this could have resonated

with some far-right Trump followers.

35 The day after this briefing, on March 19, Trump coined the term “medical war”

(2020-19-03). The meaning of this expression is unclear, but the President used it again

on April 7 (2020-07-04). In that briefing, Trump also said that the U.S. was intensifying

“the military campaign against the virus” (2020-07-04). He described the airlift efforts

of the military for COVID-19 patients and the successes of the Army Corps of Engineers.

The role of the military was often first and foremost in his briefings. A few weeks later,

on April 10, Trump tweeted that “the American people have launched the greatest

mobilization of our society since World War II. [US flag emoticon]”

[twitter:trump-greatest-mobilization]

36 In the May 15 briefing, Trump again talked about the involvement of the U.S. military

in the fight against COVID-19 while discussing Operation Warp Speed:

Operation Warp Speed has brought together all of the experts across the federalgovernment from places like the NIH, CDC, FDA, and many other agencies. Thishistoric partnership will now bring together the full resources of the Department ofHealth and Human Services with the Department of Defense. And we know whatthat means. That means the full power and strength of the military — the military.And that — really talking about the logistics — if we get it, when we get it. Thatmeans the logistics, getting it out, so that everybody can take it. (2020-15-05)

37 The delegation of logistics to the military for the vaccine effort and the vocabulary

used by Trump indicated an overt move to militarize the vaccination project. Trump

even appointed General Gus Perna as the Chief Operating Officer (COO) of Operation

Warp Speed, in a curious mix of administrative, business and military responsibilities

(2020-15-05). In the same briefing, General Perna also couched the vaccination effort in

military terms, saying “This mission is about defeating the enemy. We will defeat the

enemy. Why? Because winning matters.” (2020-15-05)

38 Clausewitz’s conception of absolute war is a useful framework in which to analyze this

statement from a theoretical point of view, as the ultimate goal is to militarily defeat

the enemy, and all military resources are to be devoted to that goal. It is not total war,

however, as both Trump and Perna made clear that the fight was a job reserved for the

military, and that the military would be solely responsible for deploying the vaccine to

the population, without civilian involvement. The general population here played a

static role, waiting to be saved by the deployment of the country’s overwhelming

military power, a phenomenon better understood in Clausewitz’s theories than in

theories of total war.

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39 During the last weeks of the 2020 presidential campaign, Trump again made frequent

references to World War II, using well-worn quotes from political leaders of that time.

On September 10, at a campaign rally in Michigan, he claimed:

America will prevail over the China virus. As Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, “Theonly thing we have to fear is fear itself.” That’s it. We're doing very well. As theBritish government advised the British people in the face of World War II: KeepCalm and Carry On. (2020-10-09)

40 Trump again provided a clear enemy by calling COVID-19 “the China virus”, equating

China with the virus, as when Roosevelt and the British Government were united

against Nazi Germany.

41 When the vaccine was finally approved by U.S. health authorities, Trump thanked an

unlikely source: the military. The President, true to form, first praised himself in a

speech on November 13, and then went on to thank the generals and the admirals for

the development of the vaccine, barely acknowledging the work of the scientists

(2020-13-11). Invoking the Defense Production Act, he claimed he had been able to

mobilize the necessary resources to develop the vaccine. This put the contribution of

the state to the fore, instead of the private companies that ultimately came up with the

vaccine, allowing the President to take personal credit for the vaccine development. A

November 2020 study from the French École Militaire comparing international military

contributions to the fight against COVID-19 suggests that the contribution of the

Department of Defense (DOD) was mostly financial, rather than scientific, as funds were

freed up for investment in medical research using the Defense Production Act (Delerue

et al. 2020).

42 Even though Trump’s public statements show a clear militarization of the effort against

COVID-19, the U.S. Government’s actual efforts turned out to be far more limited. This is

in line with Clausewitz’s analysis of war in which he argues that there are situations

where “the conditions for defeating the enemy” are not really in place, at which point

there are two limited choices. One is offensive: taking a limited amount of enemy

territory. The second is a defensive war or, as Clausewitz puts it, “holding one’s own

until things take a better turn” (Clausewitz 1984: 601). He cautions that there must be a

reasonable chance that things will get better, however, to justify a defensive war. If

your side expects to get weaker, it is better to attack in force than to wait (601). The

advantage of holding out is to exhaust the enemy (613-4), a strategy which did not work

against COVID-19. Another alternative is to hold out long enough and accept losses,

while waiting for better weapons or reinforcements to arrive—in this case, a vaccine.8

43 The Trump Administration adopted a defensive, limited strategy of holding out against

the virus while waiting for a vaccine. While the Federal Government was heavily

criticized for this strategy given the massive loss of life involved, the decisions that

were made in 2020 were also determined by the particular political structure of the U.S.

Individual states have the sole responsibility to mandate lockdowns or quarantines

(“United States: Federal, State and Local Government” 2020: 11-2; Swindell 2020). The

Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) stated clearly on its website that there

was no national lockdown, and that “States and cities are responsible for announcing

curfews, shelters in place, or other restrictions and safety measures” (FEMA 2020). This

has led to conflicts between the Federal Government and local authorities, with Trump

attempting to claim, unsuccessfully, powers over state lockdowns (Swindell 2020). In a

notable incident, Washington State Governor Jay Inslee accused Trump in April of

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55

“putting millions of people in danger of contracting COVID-19” in the President’s calls

to reopen the country (Inslee 2020). Trump’s order to reopen churches nationwide was

also rebuffed by Inslee, who said about the President, “we think he understands at this

point that he can’t dictate what states can or cannot open” (Charles 2020). The lack of

Federal Government power over health issues in the U.S. certainly limits possible

strategies to fight the virus and impedes most efforts at implementing a nationwide

“total war” effort.9

44 While it is true that the Trump Administration was hampered in its ability to undertake

a nationwide strategy against COVID-19 as the Federal Government did not have the

authority to mandate a national lockdown, it is also true that the President himself did

not want to implement strict lockdown measures to stop the virus. In this sense, from

the outset, the Trump Administration does not appear to have had any intention to

actually wage a so-called “total war” at the national level, especially as in the first few

weeks of the pandemic Trump significantly downplayed the risks posed by COVID-19 to

avoid hurting his electoral prospects later that year. The more limited strategy which

was adopted at a federal level may also have possibly been a recognition of the

fundamental lack of federal authority in decision-making in a health crisis in U.S.

domestic politics. It was also politically expedient for Trump to avoid calling for a

national lockdown to shift blame to state and local authorities for the unavoidable

economic hardships caused by local or statewide lockdowns (Bauer et al. 2020), while

Trump himself could appear as being keen to preserve the economic health of the

country which he considered to be one of his greatest electoral strengths. This strategy

seems to have resonated with Republican voters: in an article in The Atlantic published

after the November 2020 elections, Republican voters were at least partly willing to

forgive Trump for the economic disaster and to focus on previous successes (Lowrey

2020).

45 Despite the legal and political limitations of the government’s actions, there was some

federal response. On March 13, 2020 the White House issued a Proclamation declaring a

“Public Health Emergency,” which included restrictions on travel to and from a

number of foreign countries (2020-13-03). Repatriation of Americans from abroad had

already begun in January and continued into June, with the U.S. State Department

reporting 101,386 repatriations (U.S. State Department 2020). What was publicized to a

lesser extent was that the repatriation flights came at a cost. Americans wanting a State

Department flight back to the U.S. had to sign a “promissory note” agreeing to

reimburse the U.S. Government later at an unspecified cost (Mintz 2020).10 This is in

contrast to the March CARES Act and the stimulus checks, as well as other

congressional and federal financial measures put in place to ease the economic

problems and which came with no strings attached.

46 Another piece of evidence that the Federal Government deliberately limited its war on

COVID-19 was that Trump ultimately did not override state authorities by invoking

martial law. Many feared the possible seizure of direct power by the Trump

Administration throughout 2020, not only because of COVID-19, but also due to the

disruption provoked by Black Lives Matter protests in a number of American cities and

after the contested elections in November (Smith and Strauss 2020; Sicard 2020).

Ultimately, martial law was not invoked. Elizabeth Neumann, a former Trump official

in the Department of Homeland Security, argued on CNN in December 2020 that a call

from Trump for martial law would have signaled to a certain number of supporters that

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it was time to “accelerate the chaos, accelerate the coming of the civil war” (Goodwin

2020). That Trump did not attempt to declare martial law indicates that, here again, he

stopped short of total war. Perhaps surprisingly, even the attack on the Capitol in

January 2021 was not followed by a call for martial law to be put in place.

47 For much of 2020, Trump devoted his efforts elsewhere. On April 16, 2020, Trump’s

COVID-19 briefing called for a new “front in our war,” which involved “Opening Up

America Again.” He claimed that “a national shutdown is not a sustainable long-term

solution” and provided ways for governors to open up state economies (2020-16-04).

The briefing demonstrated a number of different issues that would be evident in the

Administration’s policy for the rest of the year. First, it showed that the President was

fundamentally against lockdowns due to their adverse effects on the U.S. economy.

Second, he was willing to attempt to tell state governors what to do in what had been

established as their own jurisdiction, i.e. health policy. Third, by using the term of

“opening” a new “front,” he demonstrated that one of the real objectives of the “war”

was to sustain the economy, rather than preventing the spread of the virus. Trump

continued to oppose any sort of calls for a national lockdown and was critical of strict

state measures as well (Lovelace & Higgins-Dunn 2020). The President, despite

contracting the virus himself, was consistently anti-mask, which some analysts have

claimed resulted in a large loss of life (Pazzanesse 2020).

48 If we take the two possible total war strategies laid out above, the Federal Government

neither mobilized the population into the health sector, nor did it recommend the total

lockdown of the country. The limited strategy that was chosen in this “war” against the

virus by the Trump administration was thus simply to invest vast sums of money in a

vaccine, and to hold on and wait for its development, while supporting the economy. In

other words, there was little attempt to hide the focus on the economic health of the

country (Parke 2020), and any evaluations of the Administration’s policy during the

crisis should perhaps be seen in this light. This is where one could rephrase Trump’s

war against the virus not so much as a fight between the virus vs. the American people,

but as a fight between the virus vs. the American economy.

War against COVID-19: A Comparison with France,Germany and the UK

49 To understand the Trump Administration’s military discourse during the COVID-19

pandemic, it is also useful to briefly compare it to the discourse in three other

countries: France, Germany and the United Kingdom. As with Trump, French President

Emmanuel Macron publicly declared “war” on the virus in a nationally televised

address on March 16, 2020: “We are at war” (“Nous sommes en guerre”), calling for a

“national mobilization” (“mobilisation générale”) of the French population

(Pietralunga and Lemarié 2020). In the same speech, Macron used some of the other

terms from Trump’s briefings, including referring to the “invisible enemy.” A week

later, on March 25, Macron used the terminology of total war when speaking of

mobilizing the whole country: “When you start a war, you commit to it completely, you

mobilize as one” (“Lorsqu’on engage une guerre, on s’y engage tout entier, on s’y

mobilise dans l’unité”, Macron 2020).

Angles, 12 | 2021

57

50 The French Government, unlike the U.S. Government, initiated two national lockdowns

in 2020 with financial penalties for unauthorized activities. At the end of the first

lockdown, Macron changed his tone, shifting from talk of war to one of “hope”

(Lepelletier 2020). As the situation worsened again in the winter, however, the French

President returned to talking about the war against the virus. Macron was visibly

irritated after criticism regarding the slow start of the vaccination effort in France,

arguing that he was “waging war from dawn to dusk”, adding “I expect everyone to be

as committed” (“Moi, je fais la guerre matin, midi et soir. J’attends de tous le même

engagement”, Robin 2021).

51 In France, the military participated in the transfer of COVID-19 patients from some

parts of the country to another, with 3,100 French soldiers working on the operation.

The French Army also treated patients directly in a military facility in Mulhouse

(IRSEM 2020: 3-4).

52 Unlike in the U.S., the French Government had a host of social services to combat the

economic effects of the lockdowns in the country. The temporary benefits for the

jobless (“chômage partiel”) allowed French companies to keep employees on payroll,

while the government paid a large part of their salary at a cost estimated at 27.1 billion

euros ($32.6 billion) in 2020 (BFM 2021). This example alone represented nearly three

times the cost of Operation Warp Speed in the U.S., but less than the U.S. stimulus

plans. Other measures, including corporate bailouts for companies such as Air France

as well as the cost of universal health care in the pandemic, added up to a massive

economic effort by the French state.

53 In Germany, the Army went so far as to employ 17,000 soldiers, even calling up

reservists, for logistics and support missions for the civilian anti-Covid effort (IRSEM

2020: 7-8). Despite this high level of military commitment, the German political

leadership consciously chose not to use terminology that evoked “war” when talking

about COVID-19. The German President, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, made a speech

explicitly rejecting the war metaphor in April 2020, saying: “No, this pandemic is not a

war. Nations are not against nations, soldiers are not against soldiers. This is a test of

our humanity. It is about the worst and the best of people. Let us show the best of

ourselves! And let us show it in Europe too!” (Gros-Verheyde 2020)

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54 It has been suggested that, given Germany’s history, it would not have been

internationally acceptable for Germany to talk about going to war. German leaders may

also not have wanted to encourage far-right nationalist elements within the country,

such as in the U.S. (Paulus 2020). In fact, Germany has expressed worry about the

worldwide rise of nationalism in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis at the United Nations,

which indicates that, unlike the U.S. and France, the German Government viewed the

“war” discourse around the virus as an implicit danger (Besheer 2020).

55 Notwithstanding, Germany, like France, did make a large effort in both stimulus and

the mobilization of social services to help alleviate the economic costs of lockdowns for

its population. German efforts included 251 billion euros ($300 billion) in tax deferrals

as well as immediate spending of 284 billion euros ($337 billion) to boost the economy

in 2020 (Anderson et al. 2020). While Germany did not declare a “war,” it did bring its

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58

considerable welfare state assets to contribute to relief for its citizens in a

comprehensive fashion, like France and the U.S.

56 In the United Kingdom, Prime Minister Boris Johnson also made reference to a “war”

against COVID-19. Early on in the pandemic, he argued that “We must act like any

wartime government and do whatever it takes to support our economy” (Rawlinson

2020). This implicitly referenced Winston Churchill’s “wartime government”,

suggesting that Johnson was comparable to Churchill and would also win the war. The

comparisons to Churchill appeared frequently in the British press during the crisis,

often but not always in a favorable light (Dobbs 2020). For the UK, the reference to

World War II was reassuring for some, as it implied that the war would be won if given

sufficient national effort and sacrifice. Johnson’s speech also shared Trump’s ideas that

the “enemy” (the virus) was primarily attacking the economy. The war effort was about

making sure the economy stayed afloat. Johnson’s Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, similarly

emphasized the battle against the virus as “an economic fight” (Rawlinson 2020).

Conclusion – A Biden War on Covid?

57 Despite the call for total war in the stimulus letter, the Trump Administration was

frequently criticized for not doing enough to fight the virus. As shown above, the U.S.

population was never mobilized in any coherent way to fight a “total war.” The Trump

Administration preferred a limited, defensive holding strategy intended to wait for a

vaccine in the hope of protecting the economy, Trump's main concern. This fits into

the Clausewitzian framework of limited warfare rather than that of the theories of total

war. Trump, however, ran into strong local and state opposition, resulting in a variety

of specific approaches across the country, much like during the Influenza Epidemic in

1918 and 1919.

58 President Joe Biden has continued his predecessor’s use of military vocabulary to

describe the fight against the virus. After his victory in the presidential election, he

said Americans were at “war with the virus” (“Biden Thanksgiving Speech” 2020).

Biden has not used the term “total war,” but has promised to be a “commander in

chief” and to make greater efforts to fight the virus than his predecessor. This has

included asking local authorities to make masks mandatory and to increase social

distancing rules (Herman 2020). A national lockdown was ruled out expressly by the

new President, however, in favor of attempts at a coordinated mask mandate (Sink

2020). As of the end of March 2021, while Biden’s administration could point to the very

large proportion of vaccinated Americans, he told CNN on March 30 that the “war was

far from won” and that “we’re in the life and death race with a virus that is spreading

quickly” (CNN 2021). This is not a total war, but the “life and death race” indicates that

the U.S. Government still thinks about COVID-19 in primarily military terms, or that

the U.S. Government cannot help but frame any life-and-death threat against millions

of its citizens in military terms.

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NOTES

1. The $2 trillion CARES Act of 27 March 2020 also gave families an extra $500. The relief

threshold for individuals was $99,000 in yearly income, meaning that the vast majority of

American citizens received a check.

2. Even the definition of the American Civil War as a total war has been challenged by scholars.

See Neely (1997), in particular.

3. All translations mine.

4. On Clausewitz, see Raymond Aron’s two-volume work (1976a; 1976b), and: https://

www.clausewitzstudies.org/mobile/cwzbiblenglish.htm.

5. Clausewitz stated that “If, then, civilized nations do not put their prisoners to death or

devastate cities and countries, it is because intelligence plays a larger part in the methods of

warfare and has taught them more effective ways using force than the crude expression of

instinct.” (Clausewitz 1984: 76) This statement should not be taken as a description of

Clausewitz’s respect for human rights, which would be both questionable and anachronistic. It is

rather an instrumental analysis in which Clausewitz is saying that attacks on civilians takes away

necessary resources and effort from the true military goals of warfare.

6. Dr. Mark Kortepeter, a bioweapons expert, does not argue in his article (Kortepeter 2020) that

COVID-19 was developed as a biological weapon, but assesses whether it could potentially be a

“good” one. His conclusions are that the virus would not, in fact, be a useful biological weapon in

the future. The article is purely technical and does not make any attempt to explore the ethical

implications of using COVID-19 as a biological weapon.

7. A search of the Factba.se database of Trump’s speeches and tweets returned 358 references for

a search for “China virus.” https://factba.se/search#%22China%2Bvirus%22 (searching in the

calendar year 2020), “Chinese virus” has 27 references, https://factba.se/

search#%22Chinese%2Bvirus%22.

8. The British and French strategy of limiting offensives and waiting for American

reinforcements to arrive and train in World War I is relevant here for comparative purposes.

9. It should be noted that during the Influenza Pandemic in 1918 and 1919, the response was

largely local, with cities implementing varied responses that had very different results (Strochlic

& Champine 2020). The Federal Government was not very involved and made little mention of

the flu.

10. Some families may have been asked to pay up to $2,500/person for the repatriation flights.

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ABSTRACTS

In the Economic Impact Payment letter to American citizens in Spring 2020, President Donald

Trump wrote that “we wage total war on this invisible enemy.” Trump likely did not intend to

explicitly link this to the rich theory about “total war” in military history, but this article

examines the American rhetoric surrounding the war on COVID-19 to see whether it corresponds

to definitions of total war in military strategic thought. The Clausewitzian origins of the idea of

“absolute war” and limited war will also be examined to ascertain their relevance as a framework

for understanding the American approach to the conflict with the virus. A total war strategy

would have implied either mobilizing the entire population into the health sector or imposing a

total national lockdown. This article examines both the strategy outlined by Donald Trump and

the reality of what was undertaken by the Federal Government. The military was involved in the

war effort against the virus in the U.S., but only in a logistical and financial sense. A national

lockdown was never intended due to its potential adverse effects on the economy, and in any

case, the Federal Government did not have the authority to impose health policy on individual

states and local authorities. The result was a variety of local responses to the crisis with little

federal coordination, much like what occurred with the Influenza Epidemic of 1918-19. Despite

its military and hyperbolic rhetoric, the Trump Administration did not choose a total war

strategy. Instead, it decided to adopt a limited holding strategy that accepted human losses while

protecting the economy and waiting for a Government-sponsored vaccine to save the day.

Dans la lettre adressée aux citoyens américains au printemps 2020 qui accompagnait un

versement censé diminuer l’impact économique de la pandémie, le président Donald Trump

écrivait : « nous menons une guerre totale contre cet ennemi invisible. » Trump n'avait

probablement pas l’intention d'établir un lien explicite avec la célèbre théorie de la « guerre

totale » en histoire militaire, néanmoins cet article examine la rhétorique américaine autour de

la guerre contre le COVID-19 pour voir dans quelle mesure elle peut correspondre aux définitions

de la « guerre totale » dans la pensée stratégique militaire. Les origines clausewitziennes de la

notion de « guerre absolue » et de « guerre limitée » seront également examinées afin de

déterminer leur pertinence comme cadre conceptuel pour comprendre l’approche américaine

dans sa lutte contre le virus. Une stratégie de guerre totale aurait impliqué soit la mobilisation de

l’ensemble de la population dans le secteur de la santé, soit l’imposition d’un confinement

national total. Cet article examine la stratégie exposée par Donald Trump et la réalité de ce qui a

été entrepris par le gouvernement fédéral. Si l’armée a bien participé à l’effort de guerre contre

le virus aux États-Unis, cet effort était uniquement logistique et financier. Un confinement

national n’a jamais été envisagé en raison de ses effets négatifs potentiels sur l’économie et, de

toutes façons, le gouvernement fédéral n’avait pas le pouvoir d’imposer une politique sanitaire

aux différents États et autorités locales. Le résultat a été une variété de réponses locales à la crise

avec peu de coordination fédérale, un peu comme ce qui s'est passé avec l’épidémie de grippe de

1918-19. Malgré son discours martial et hyperbolique, l’administration Trump n’a pas choisi une

stratégie de guerre totale. Au lieu de cela, elle a adopté une stratégie d’attente limitée, acceptant

les pertes humaines, tout en cherchant à protéger l’économie jusqu’à ce qu’un vaccin financé par

le gouvernement vienne sauver la situation.

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INDEX

Mots-clés: Trump Donald, COVID-19, stimulus, guerre totale, gouvernement américain,

rhéthorique politique, guerre absolue, confinement, Clausewitz Carl von, extrême droite,

Seconde Guerre Mondiale

Keywords: Trump Donald, COVID-19, stimulus, total war, US Government, political rhetoric,

absolute war, lockdown, Clausewitz Carl von, far-right, World War II

AUTHOR

CHRISTOPHER GRIFFIN

Christopher Griffin holds a PhD in International Relations from the University of Southern

California. He is Maître des conferences and Director of studies in the LEA program at UCO Nantes.

He has worked extensively on issues of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism, and has

published a number of articles on the Algerian War, the Nigerian Civil War, French and American

military operations in the Sahel and in Somalia, and British, French and American strategies in

the War in Afghanistan. Contact: cgriffin [at] uco.fr

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Operation Warp Speed as a“Moonshot”: Some Public PolicyLessonsNicholas Sowels

Introduction

1 Before the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, Donald Trump was fairly well-positioned

to win the November elections given the strength of the US economy and very low

unemployment (OECD). But then his administration and Mr Trump himself in

particular fumbled badly as the pandemic took hold.1 Through a combination of

bravado (not wearing a mask), denial (repeated declarations that the virus would just

go away[Bump]), hare-brained solutions (injecting bleach as a remedy [Rogers et al.]),

and party politicking (calls for states to lift restrictions), etc., President Trump

managed the crisis poorly. Instead of bringing the country together in a common cause

which would surely have helped public policy in facing such a massive challenge, he

encouraged divisions with consequences later for vaccine acceptance, as we shall see

below. Instead of the US cooperating with countries across the world and international

institutions, Mr Trump repeatedly referred to COVID-19 as a “Chinese virus” to stoke

antipathy to China, and in July 2020 even announced the United States would leave the

WHO (Huang).

2 In the meantime, the US health system — by far the most expensive in the world — was

struggling badly in dealing with the spreading pandemic. As refrigerated containers

were storing the dead in New York City as the city morgues could not cope with the

influx of bodies, high-end private health institutions faced cash shortages because

elective treatments were being cancelled: US healthcare seemed “broken” (Hook and

Kuchler).

3 Yet despite the pandemonium prevailing in the White House, in May 2020 the Trump

administration launched Operation Warp Speed (OWS) to bring out a vaccine for the

coronavirus by the end of the year, when it was widely believed at the time that it could

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take several years to create one — if ever. In many ways, OWS was a remarkable

success. The US helped several vaccines emerge and its vaccination rollout during the

first months of 2021 was largely effective, despite some early problems.

4 This article proposes to examine the implementation of OWS as an unusual public

policy project, bringing together public and private-sector actors, and substantial state

funding. In particular, OWS has been referred to as a “moonshot”, including by Alex

Azar, the former Secretary of Health and Human Resources and architect of the project.

Writing in The New York Times in August 2021 to stress the reliability of vaccines and to

support the vaccination of US citizens in the face of expanding partisan resistance, he

compared OWS to President Kennedy’s quest to get an American to the moon in the

1960s (Azar).

5 This article begins by presenting in detail how OWS unfolded as a remarkable public

policy project. It then discusses to what extent OWS may be used as an example for

government-led projects. Here, the article draws on the work of Mariana Mazzucato, a

leading international proponent of “entrepreneurial states”, and advocate of

governments being more mission-oriented in addressing global challenges. In Mission

Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism (2021), Mazzucato also draws

substantially on the lessons of the US’s Apollo programme to get to the moon, and how

this provides a template for renewed government action today. Yet Mazzucato

recognises that while aspects of OWS were highly successful, the vaccine rollout faced

initial problems and later ran into partisan resistance. The article then qualifies OWS as

a state-led project, using the concept of “disciplined pluralism” developed by British

economist John Kay which emphasises how markets provide critical feedback in

validating innovation, by rewarding success and sanctioning failure. So, while the US

federal government was heavily involved in developing vaccines, OWS also entailed

strong competition and selection between many private companies seeking to produce

a vaccine. Lastly, this contribution seeks to mobilise elements of the expanding

literature on complex systems which provides insights into how public policies operate

within complex environments. Such complexity analysis helps understand some of the

difficulties the vaccine rollout has faced in the US and elsewhere, notably with the

emergence of resistance to vaccination: i.e., following complexity theory, resistance has

emerged “bottom up” at local and state level, challenging the federal government’s “top

down” vaccination campaign, becoming a culture war issue with time.

The launching and organisation of Operation WarpSpeed

6 Writing at the end of April 2020, the Irish journalist Fintan O’Toole summarised the

bewilderment of many at the staggering mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic in

the United States: “the world has loved, hated and envied the US. Now, for the first

time, we pity it” (O’Toole). More than a year later, the US — still the world’s largest

economy (World Bank) — continues to have the world’s highest numbers of cases and

deaths: respectively (on 7 August 2021) 35.7 million and 616,504, and so ahead of India

(with 31.9 million cases and 427,371 deaths) (Johns Hopkins).

7 But, at the time Mr O’Toole was writing and Donald Trump was holding his daily press

show, the United States was also preparing an ambitious programme to develop a

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vaccine, or vaccines, at breakneck speed. This was a time — it should not be forgotten

— when the world was staggering under the unprecedented experience of lockdowns,

and many in the scientific community were warning that it could take years to find a

vaccine — if ever — as no vaccine had ever been developed against a coronavirus

(Thompson).

8 Initial discussions for setting up a special project started in April 2020 and were

reported at the end of the month (DoD). By then, $456 million dollars of federal money

had already been committed to the Johnson & Johnson vaccine for Phase 1 clinical trials

(on the 30 March), and an allocation of $483 million in funding was announced on 16

April for Moderna, a relative start-up, to accelerate its vaccine development

programme after it had begun Phase 1 trials (DHHSc). However, “frustrated” with

warnings by experts like the suddenly-mediatised Dr Anthony Fauci2 that it could take

18 months to develop a vaccine, President Donald Trump pushed for the

implementation of a more rapid programme (Sanger). Thus, on 15 May 2020, he

announced the establishment of Operation Warp Speed (OWS) as a coordinated inter-

agency and public-private partnership programme to finance vaccine research,

development, manufacture, and deployment (DHHSa). Its initial objective was “to have

substantial quantities of a safe and effective vaccine available for Americans by January

2021.” Over time, this objective became more precise — the provision of 300 million

doses — though the timing shifted somewhat from “by January”, to “as of January”.3

Political manoeuvrings and project hype

9 The drive to set up OWS was largely led by Department of Health and Human Resources

(DHHR) Secretary Alex Azar, who had been side-lined by Mr Trump when he put vice-

President Mike Pence in charge of the coronavirus task force at the end of February

2020. Mr Azar’s four-week tenure in the position had been controversial, and Mr Pence

was to bring the “gravitas” of his office to the job (Diamond & Cancryn). The latter’s

more deliberative style did lead to a more ordered approach in the White House, but

may have slowed down decision-making while the Vice-President was dealing with Mr

Trump’s mercurial behaviour on questions like wearing masks (Diamond & Cancryn). In

response to his weakened position, Secretary Azar and about a dozen officials at the

DHHR and the Department of Defense (DoD) then began working on a programme to

create a vaccine, quickly labelled “MP2”, standing for Manhattan Project 2, with Mr

Azar boldly proclaiming: “If we can develop an atomic bomb in 2.5 years and put a man

on the moon in seven years, we can do this this year, in 2020” (Diamond).

10 Like the initial Manhattan Project, MP2 was to be headed by a scientist and an army

general to bring together technical expertise and military organisation. This mirrored

the joint organisational responsibility of the programme by the DHHR and the DoD (see

below). It led to the appointment of Dr Moncef Slaoui, a scientist and businessman

(with Moroccan, Belgian and US nationality), who had been responsible for developing

numerous vaccines at GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) until 2017, and four-star General Gustave

F. Perna, who, as head of the US Army Material Command, was as an expert in logistics

(DHHSa; Baker and Koons). The programme was then renamed to drop the atomic

bomb reference. At the suggestion of Dr Peter Marks, a top official at the Food and Drug

Administration (FDA) and a Star Trek fan, it was baptised Operation Warp Speed, in

reference to faster-than-light travel by the Starship Enterprise in the popular sci-fi TV

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show. This was to catch the imagination of persons involved in the project, as well as of

the public (Solender). OWS also received an official seal (see Figure 1).Figure 1: Official seal of Operation Warp Seed

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Warp_Speed

11 These decisions were not without controversy. In particular, Dr Slaoui was criticised for

being employed as a contractor so he could retain shares he owned in GSK, even though

the company went on to receive substantial funding under OWS (see below). His

response to this was to guarantee to give away any excess capital gains on GSK stocks

he would earn, and to give up his position on the board of Moderna and sell his shares

in Moderna on taking up his position in OWS (Moderna became one of the first

companies to successfully make a vaccine, see Cohen). More significantly perhaps, the

name of Operation Warp Speed was also criticised by some (like Dr Fauci), for

suggesting that the haste to produce a vaccine could make OWS seem “reckless”, and so

undermine public confidence (Solender).

12 Significantly, the leaders of the project were able to limit direct interference in its

operations from other parts of government, even from President Trump himself. The

latter was obviously keen for the discovery of a safe vaccine to be announced before the

November 2020 elections, but Dr Slaoui claims he was able to argue with the President

that science could not be managed that way. He also noted that Jared Kushner was

supportive on this point (Solender). However, Dr Slaoui expressed concerns at the end

of 2020 that the politicisation of OWS during the 2020 elections could weaken its public

acceptance.4

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The organisational strengths of Operation Warp Speed

13 Three key factors explain the success of OWS, according to Thomas Durand, a professor

of management at France’s CNAM.5 The first involved drawing on a variety of existing

possible types of vaccines, whatever their origin. Second, OWS re-engineered the

traditional sequencing of vaccine production, collapsing early research and clinical

trial phases; and third, production of vaccines was launched as testing was still going

on (Durand). To these points may be added the management structure of OWS itself,

the willingness to commit substantial funding to the search for a vaccine as well as for

pre-certification manufacture, and preparations for distributing a vaccine once

certified and produced.

14 To achieve its objectives of providing 300 million vaccine doses, OWS initially selected

14 candidate vaccines from more than a hundred, and then narrowed its choice to

about eight (DHHSa). These were chosen using four criteria: i) candidate vaccines had

to provide data rapidly suggesting safety and efficacy; ii) they had to be able, with OWS

backing, to enter Phase 3 trials (involving 30,000 persons or more) by the summer or

autumn of 2020; iii) they had to use vaccine-platform technologies (i.e., mechanisms or

delivery vectors of vaccines) permitting fast and effective manufacturing; and iv)

candidate vaccines had to use one of the three vaccine-platform technologies believed

to be safe and effective against COVID-19, namely: the mRNA, viral-vector, and protein

platforms (Slaoui & Hepburn).6

15 A major aspect of selection was to hedge bets by picking two vaccine candidates per

platform: in the words of Moncef Slaoui and Matthew Hepburn of OWS, “diversification

mitigate[d] the risk of failure due to safety, efficacy, industrial manufacturability or

scheduling factors” (Slaoui & Hepburn). Moreover, the project accepted candidates

from anywhere, with no obvious aim of promoting national champions. Or, as Durand

has put it:

Pfizer is not a leader in vaccines, BioNTech is a German start-up, founded moreoverby two Turkish-immigrant biologists. So what? (Pfizer refused such financing butnot a pre-order for 300 million doses). Moderna is an American start-up managedby a Frenchman. So what? It doesn’t matter if there are failures, including of Sanofiand GlaxoSmithKline […]7

16 Another key factor in OWS’s approach was to shorten the sequencing of traditional

vaccine development and rollout. This normally involves many steps carried out in

order: exploratory science, preclinical trials, clinical trials (Phase 1, Phase 2, and large

Phase 3 trials), large-scale manufacturing, and finally review and licensure by the FDA

(the Food and Drug Administration). While these steps may involve some overlap, it

typically takes 10 years (or longer) to get from exploratory science to large-scale

manufacture. In the case of OWS, the whole process was collapsed. In particular, the

selection of candidates was done to combine the exploratory and preclinical stages,

while the organisation of production began with Phase 1 trials. Here, OWS funding thus

covered the risks of losses were vaccines to fail during later trials. As a result, and as

the FDA brought forward emergency use authorisation (EUA) during Phase 3 trials, the

entire cycle was cut to around 10 months (USGAO). Moreover, apart from financing

research and making major pre-orders of doses, OWS was actively involved in

expanding the production of ancillary supplies like needles, syringes, glass vials, and

vial alternatives, etc. (see Table 2).

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17 In terms of management, OWS was very much a joint operation shared by the

Department of Health and Human Resources (DHHR) and the Department of Defense

(DoD), and agencies within these departments, including: the Centers for Disease

Control and Prevention (CDC), the FDA, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the

Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), and the Defense

Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) (DHHSb). In fact, of the 90 persons in

leadership positions in OWS in July 2020, about 60 were military officials, including at

least four generals. Many of these had never worked in health care before, but they

played essential roles in the whole logistical challenge of producing vaccines, which

included securing shipments of materials from across the globe, and preparations for

the distribution of vaccines in the US (Florko 2020). Private companies like Fedex and

UPS have been involved in shipping vaccines, and Mckesson (a medical distribution

specialist) held the centralised distributor contract (DHHSb). But control was

centralised. In the words of General Perna, “We need to know where every vial was,

whether it was in the factory, or it was on a truck, or it had been distributed down to an

administration site; we must have 100% accountability of all vaccines every day”

(reported by Lopez). In addition, the military had the task of maintaining the physical

security of the production and distribution process, and the cybersecurity of OWS,

especially against “state actors” (i.e. foreign governments) who might have wanted it to

fail (Florko 2020).

18 In short, the organisational strength of OWS, which also included about 600 DHHR staff

(Florko 2020), was based on the way it brought together actors from the public and

private sectors in a public-private partnership. Instead of being a government agency,

it was more an ephemeral mechanism to coordinate a multitude of government bodies

and many private organisations. As Paul Stoffels, chief scientific officer at Johnson &

Johnson noted, OWS was “a coordination activity that help[ed] cut through the

bureaucracy faster” (Baker and Koons).

19 Finally, substantial funding played a huge part in the whole process. Initially when

Operation Warp Speed was launched, $10 billion was granted to the project through the

CARES Act passed in March 2020 to fight the pandemic (DHHSa). With time, the outlays

expanded to over $18 billion, the vast majority of which went directly to vaccine

development and purchase, as well as into supporting manufacture (see Tables 1 and 2).Table 1: Vaccine Contracts and Development Finance by US Authorities (as of 1 March 2021)

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Source: Congressional Research Service, “Operation Warp Speed Contracts for COVID-19 Vaccinesand Ancillary Vaccination Materials”, Insight, updated 1 March 2021 (based on data from the DHHRand the DoD).

Table 2: Federal Government Contracts for (Selected) Ancillary COVID-19 Vaccine Supplies (as of 1March 2021)

Source: Congressional Research Service, “Operation Warp Speed Contracts for COVID-19 Vaccinesand Ancillary Vaccination Materials”, Insight, updated 1 March 2021 (based on data from the DHHRand the DoD).

The results and critiques of Operation Warp Speed

20 At the change of presidencies on 20 January 2021, the FDA had granted emergency-use

authorisation (EUA) to two vaccines using mRNA technology: the Pfizer/BioNTech and

Moderna vaccines. While the AstraZeneca vaccine also received substantial US funding

(see Table 1) and was authorised for use in the UK at the end of 2020 and subsequently

by the European Medicines Agency, it has not yet been authorised for use in the US.

This reflects the vaccine’s troubled history with early data difficulties and concerns

over very small risks of associated blood clots (Machemer). On 6 August 2021, however,

the FDA announced it would allow the export of US-produced doses of the AstraZeneca

vaccine (FDA). At the end of February 2021, the FDA also gave EUA to the Johnson &

Johnson (Janssen) vaccine, though this too was amended in late April, again to account

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for very rare blood clots. Finally, in June 2021, Novavax declared that its Phase 3 trial

indicated an overall efficacy rate of 90.4 percent, similar to Pfizer/BioNTech and

Moderna (Zimmer). Other things being equal, and taking into account efforts

throughout the international scientific community (it was estimated, for example, that

by end 2020, 200,000 research papers had been published on the coronavirus

[Meyerowitz-Katz]), OWS was thus highly successful in supporting the rapid

development of vaccines.

21 In terms of the vaccine delivery and rollout, the US Government Accountability Office

(GAO, a Congressional office of audit) quotes figures by OWS officials that, as of 31

January 2021, authorised companies had released 63.7 million doses. This was

equivalent to 32 percent of the 200 million doses which firms with EUAs had been

contracted to provide by 31 March 2021 (USGAO). Yet it was short of the 300 million

doses target envisaged in 2020, and the early phases of the rollout in the US were

criticised for being slow, characterised by long waiting lines, vaccine registration

websites crashing, and health resources being tied up by the January surge of the

pandemic (Leathery and Schoenfeld Walker). More specifically, a report by the

American Association of Retired Persons published mid-January 2021 points out several

problems delaying deployment, including: the unprecedented speed in vaccine

development which actually intensified deployment difficulties in itself; the challenge

of distributing mRNA vaccines requiring ultra-cold storage; organising flows given the

need to ensure second-dose availability; a concentration of OWS efforts on producing

vaccines with less attention being paid to their distribution at state-level, where

infrastructures were underfunded; problems faced by hospitals in administering

vaccines to staff just as the pandemic surged in the winter; resistance by persons to

taking vaccines, and bottlenecks arising from allocating vaccines first to priority

groups such as long-term care residents and staff (Markowitz).

22 These early difficulties contributed to the departure of Dr Slaoui from the US

vaccination effort after the Biden Administration came into office. Dr Slaoui was also

criticised for suggesting at one point that only one Moderna dose needed to be

administered, after concerns about conflicts of interest, already mentioned above

(Weintraub). But, it should be noted that General Perna continued to work under the

Biden Administration as Chief Operating Officer of the Federal COVID-19 Response for

vaccine and therapeutics, even though he too had been criticised for problems with the

vaccine rollout (Lee). More generally, in late March 2021, much of the organisational

structure of OWS was still in place (even if its name was dropped), as was the software

programme Tiberius8 used to track deployment. Instead of scrapping OWS’s

organisation, the Biden administration tried to make it more effective (Florko 2021).

23 Indeed, on assuming office, President Biden took a positive and supporting approach to

fighting the pandemic, encouraging the wearing of masks, and helping state

governments’ efforts. On arriving at the White House, his team published a 200-page

National Strategy for the COVID-19 Response and Pandemic Preparedness, which committed

to vaccinating the US population, and supporting local actors more pro-actively with

distribution:

The federal government will execute an aggressive vaccination strategy, focusingon the immediate actions necessary to convert vaccines into vaccinations, includingimproving allocation, distribution, administration, and tracking. Central to thiseffort will be additional support and funding for state, local, Tribal, and territorialgovernments — and improved line of sight into supply — to ensure that they are

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best prepared to mount local vaccination programs. At the same time, the federalgovernment will mount an unprecedented public campaign that builds trust aroundvaccination and communicates the importance of maintaining public healthmeasures such as masking, physical distancing, testing, and contact tracing even aspeople receive safe and effective vaccinations (Biden).

Graph 1: Vaccine Doses Delivered per 100 persons in the first half of 2021 (first and second dosecombined).

Source: OECD, https://www.oecd.org/coronavirus/en/data-insights/eo-2021-05-vaccine-rollout-remains-uneven.

24 Yet this quote also reveals the complexity of the vaccine deployment process

(allocation, distribution, administration and tracking); the variety of jurisdictions

involved in the US vaccination programme (state, local, Tribal, and territorial

governments); and finally the importance of getting public trust for implementing such

a massive public health policy — a task made more difficult by the inconsistencies and

politicisation of the vaccine programme (discussed below). All that said, despite early

difficulties of the US rollout, Graph 1 shows that the US vaccination campaign did then

pick up comparatively very well.

Operation Warp Speed as a Moonshot

25 The Trump administration’s response to COVID-19 was widely judged as chaotic. Yet

OWS was instrumental in supporting the vaccine effort in the US and globally. Here, an

attempt is made to analyse in what way OWS may viewed as a successful government-

led moonshot, as proposed by Marina Mazzucato, a leading advocate of state

entrepreneurship, and more recently a proponent of mission-oriented public policy.

But elements of OWS also support the view that market competition provided the

“disciplined pluralism” (John Kay) needed to curtail poor projects which unchecked

state support may otherwise have pursued at great cost. Finally, this section examines

how complexity analysis can help in examining certain difficulties of the vaccination

rollout as a public policy.

The Mission Economy and OWS as a Moonshot

26 Mariana Mazzucato is a recognised proponent of the role of government in research

and development (R&D). In 2013, she published The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking

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Public vs. Private Sector Myths, which challenges the prevailing mainstream neoliberal

economic orthodoxy that governments are cumbersome and bureaucratic, while only

the private sector is risk-taking and innovative. This book identifies how government

(in the US especially) has repeatedly acted to support technologies through direct

finance or via tax exemptions, and in many cases actually develop them. In doing so,

the state “de-risks” private sector activities and addresses market failures like funding

basic research, justified even in mainstream economics (Mazzucato 2013). In fact,

government has often taken major risks in spearheading the development of new

“general purpose technologies”, which have been vital to a wide range of sectors,

especially in America’s “mass production system”, including aviation and space

technologies, information technology (IT), and more recently life-sciences,

nanotechnology, and clean energy industries, and notably the Internet (Mazzucato

2013: 62-3).

27 In a case study, Mazzucato examines how stated-backed technologies contributed to

the launch of Apple Computer in the 1970s, but especially to Steve Job’s revival of the

firm, beginning with the iPod in the 2000s. Along with its “siblings” — the iPad and

iPhone — the iPod revolutionised Apple’s fortunes, which had become a niche player in

computer technology. Yet, for all the brilliant design and quality of Apple, the core

technologies of these new products arose at some point due to government support for

hardware (microprocessors, RAMs, hard-drives, lithium-ion batteries, liquid crystal

displays, etc.), and for software (HTTP/HTML Internet protocols, SIRI voice recognition,

and GPS) (Mazzucato 2013: 87-112).

28 Apart from recalling the creative role of government, notably in the US, The

Entrepreneurial State points to how the benefits of technologies fostered by government

accrue to the private sector. Here the book returns to the much-discussed notion after

the global financial crisis in 2007-2008 about how neoliberal economics privatises

profits and collectivises losses: or in this case, socialises risks. This in turn is connected

to how large companies like Apple game the international tax system, with its

loopholes and tax havens, to pay very little tax. For Mazzucato, redressing this

situation requires changes to tax systems, and new institutions for states to collect

investment revenues. But it also requires a new narrative about government’s essential

role in wealth creation (Mazzucato 2013: 181-91).

29 With Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism (2021), Mazzucato takes

forward the case for recreating the capacity of states to address major challenges the

world faces by adopting “a very different approach to public-private partnerships”

(Mazzucato 2021a). The central thesis of this book is that governments need the

courage to build up their capacity and to rediscover their confidence in tackling

complex “wicked” problems (i.e., problems that are hard, if not impossible to solve, due

to complex causalities with multiple, sometimes contradictory consequences)

(Mazzucato 2021a: 3). To do so, governments should create organisational systems that

address big challenges, notably the pursuit of sustainable development goals, and the

green energy transition.

30 More specifically, in Mission Economy, Mazzucato argues that governments should set up

capacities to undertake specific missions or moonshots, in which they are more directly

involved as agents and not just purchasers contracting out to the private sector. The

template for such an approach to government action is the Apollo programme whose

objective President John F. Kennedy proclaimed in 1961 when he called on Congress to

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finance the moon landing by the end of the decade (Kennedy). According to Mazzucato,

there are six attributes which defined this project:

(1) vision infused with a strong sense of purpose; (2) risk-taking and innovation; (3)organisational dynamism; (4) collaboration and spillovers across multiple sectors;(5) long-term horizons and budgeting that focused on outcomes; and (6) a dynamicpartnership between the public and private sectors (Mazzucato 2021a: 60).

31 In the case of Apollo, getting to the moon involved up to 400,000 people and cost

$28 billion at the time, the equivalent today of $283 billion (Mazzucato 2021a: 3). This

was about 1.1 percent of federal spending, and its mission spread out over more than a

decade. The Apollo programme was managed by NASA, a major government

bureaucracy, based on the management practices of the time.

32 So, is Operation Warp Speed an example of the kind of Mission Economy programme

which could help reinvigorate The Entrepreneurial State? Was it the moonshot Secretary

Azar has claimed? And what lessons does it hold out? In an article for Project Syndicate,

Mazzucato states, “the development of Covid-19 vaccines in less than a year was clearly

a major achievement. But the rollout has been far from perfect” (Mazzucato 2021c).

More specifically, she notes that “Mission-oriented innovation agencies”, especially

DARPA and BARDA were “critical in seeding the development of cutting-edge mRNA

vaccines”. This certainly conforms to the role of government in promoting R&D

revealed in her earlier book, while “[t]he collective spirit and outcome-driven approach

to vaccine research and development last year recalled the Apollo program”

(Mazzucato 2021b). Significantly also was the way OWS supported the manufacture of

vaccines. As we have seen above, this began massively during Phase 3 trials. Such early

production was instrumental in shortening the emergence of vaccines. But it also

meant that public funding was bearing the risk of vaccines being rejected at a later

stage. This in turn raises the question of how, and to what extent, the US government

should recover some of its investments.

33 This question is potentially important with respect to Mazzucato’s qualified

observations about the (global) vaccination process, which she has called an

“earthshot”: “[w]hile technological breakthroughs can provide new tools, they are not

necessarily solutions in themselves. Earthshots require attention to political,

regulatory and behavioural changes” (Mazzucato 2021b). Here the clear challenge lies

in the disparity between high-income and low-income countries, which risks leading to

“vaccine apartheid” across the world (Mazzucato 2021b). Yet, meeting this challenge

would require far more resources, in money and personnel. From this point of view,

OWS, with its light, flexible structure was a far, far smaller organisation than NASA,

with a much lower budget.

“Disciplined pluralism” versus moonshots

34 In reviewing Mission Economy, John Kay, a prominent British economist and long-time

columnist in The Financial Times, takes a decidedly critical view. Concerning Operation

Warp Speed, he notes (writing in January 2021) that the rapid development of vaccines

“is, at least provisionally, a success story”. But he goes on to state emphatically that the

“development is not the product of visionary central direction but is the result of a

competitive process with many different teams around the world attempting to be

among the first across the finishing line”. These teams, Kay argues, drew on “a

combination of existing academic science with the expertise in development and

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testing and the manufacturing and logistics capabilities of the global pharmaceutical

industry”. By contrast, “[t]he role of government, appropriately, [was] primarily in

funding basic research and assuring that there will be a rewarding market for

successful products” (Kay 2021).

35 Indeed, Kay’s critique of Mission Economy rests much on his concept of “disciplined

pluralism”, which is guaranteed more by the competitiveness of markets than by

government. In The Truth about Markets: their Genius, their Limits and their Follies, a book

published in 2003, he argues that innovation is largely a piecemeal process that is hard

to guide. In particular, Kay asserts that “[m]ost decisions are wrong. Most experiments

fail. It is tempting to believe that if we entrusted the future of our companies, our

industries, our countries, to the right people, they would lead us unerringly to the

promised land. Such hopes are always disappointed” (Kay 2003: 105). When politicians

— or even major business leaders — exercise great power, without appropriate

mechanisms for “the recognition of error” (Kay 2003: 357) they frequently get it badly

wrong. In fact, in business, “temporary winners [are] almost always displaced as they

failed to anticipate the next step of the journey” of innovation (Kay 2021). Kay

specifically cites the example of IT. While indeed spurred on by the Apollo programme,

IT has been a perpetually changing sector in which yesterday’s giants like IBM, and a

host of other players such as Digital Equipment, WordPerfect, Wang Laboratories,

CompuServe, Netscape, AOL, BlackBerry, etc. have been swept aside by new entrants

offering new products and services; even Microsoft has failed to anticipate mobile or

cloud computing (Kay 2021). If we apply this observation to OWS, it may be noted that

mRNA technology has indeed made two newcomers global players in pharmaceuticals:

BioNTech (Pfizer’s associate which actually developed the COVID-19 vaccine) and

Moderna. By contrast, previous leaders of the vaccine industry like Sanofi and GSK (Dr

Slaoui’s former company) have yet to produce marketable vaccines (as of August 2021),

while work by Merck and the Institut Pasteur, both historical vaccine developers too,

was abandoned in January 2021 (Herzberg and Rosier).

36 Moreover, it is not without some irony that Kay mentions Boris Johnson’s own aborted

“operation moonshot”, launched in September 2020 to create the capacity to test 10

million people per day by early 2021. Here, it was reported that the Prime Minister —

known for his penchant for big gestures and projects — had asked for “a Manhattan

Project-type approach to delivering the level of innovation/pace required to make this

possible”. Documents about Britain’s “Mass Population Testing Plan” suggested costs

could have run to a staggering £100 billion (Booth and Boseley) before plans were

integrated into a new, more modest test and trace programme at the end of October

2020.

37 Finally, it should be remembered that for all its spectacular success, getting to the

moon was hugely expensive, and once the Americans had won the space race, the

Apollo programme was rapidly wound up. The moonshot was wildly exciting. But how

useful was it really?

OWS and the complexity of vaccine rollouts

38 The challenges of dealing with COVID-19 are far from over and remain complex. From

the beginning, managing the pandemic has required making impossible choices.

Governments everywhere have had to balance public health objectives with the need to

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keep economies and societies open, while dealing with uncertainties about treatments,

a mutating virus, and public scepticism. Moreover, actions by nation states can only go

so far: the virus is global, and in a very real sense “no one is safe, until everyone is”.9

39 From this point of view, it is useful to go beyond the moonshot/disciplined pluralism

approaches presented above (albeit in simplified form), and look at how complexity

theory may be applied to OWS and its broader environment. Complexity theory (CT) is

a relatively new area of analysis, though organised research on the subject is often

identified with the creation of the Santa Fe Institute in 1984. Stated most simply, it

seeks to understand complex systems and their interacting or changing elements by

going beyond Newtonian causalities (i.e., hard cause-and-effect explanations of

phenomena). While CT originated in natural sciences, it has also been applied to social

systems, including government, which itself has become far more complex as a result of

New Public Management, and the increasing use of partnerships and networks between

private and public actors to deliver public services.10

40 Indeed, much work has been done on complexity and public services since the early

2000s, although it is hard to identify an overarching framework and structured set of

applications with regards to specific policy areas. That said, some ideas do stand out,

apart from a general understanding of the challenges which complexity represents, and

awareness of how public policies are tentative, almost by definition, given the

permanent evolution of systems and their components parts often leading to the

emergence of new phenomena from the “bottom up” in the face of, and independent to,

“top down” rules. In contrast to chaotic processes, however, “complex adaptive

systems” do have elements of order “as defined by patterns of replicated behaviour for

given periods”. These are called attractors, and often comprise values, beliefs and

behavioural logics (with values playing an especially important role in shaping the

evolution of policy). Significantly too, CT examines questions like path dependency

which shape the evolution of systems, though so-called bifurcation points also lead to

major path changes (Hayes).

41 In terms of OWS, CT may be used to understand the two phases of the operation:

vaccine production and the vaccination rollout. Overall, there was little to question the

value of producing a vaccine — or vaccines — to fight COVID-19. In spring 2020,

lockdowns swept across the world with spectacular speed, massively changing the daily

lives of nearly everyone, with drastic consequences for social behaviour, psychological

health, and economic activity worldwide. Meanwhile, health systems approached

breaking point everywhere. In terms of complexity theory, the case for creating

vaccines was a clear attractor in mobilising resources and OWS was the most substantial

programme to meet this challenge in the West (though China’s efforts on vaccination

have been significant, and Russia’s Sputnik V appears to be an effective vaccine, see

Jones and Roy). Nor was OWS alone, as it should be recalled that BioNTech and Oxford

University were supported by the German and British governments respectively to

produce the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines. Nevertheless, these vaccines also

benefited from large US orders. More generally, once the strategic choices of OWS had

been made on vaccine selection, they too functioned as attractors, while the shortened

sequencing of vaccine development manifests elements of both bifurcation from

existing practices, and subsequently path dependency: mRNA technology in particular

has considerable potential for vaccine research.

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42 By contrast, the vaccination rollout shows up the kinds of challenges, feedbacks and

complications to be expected in complex systems. Failure to produce 300 million doses

by the end of January may not have been inevitable, though the scale of the task was

huge. But the problems of the vaccination campaign discussed above are scarcely

surprising given the size of the US, the dispersion of its population, as well as its federal

and state governmental structure with multiple jurisdictions, although the Biden

administrative did build on OWS’s organisational preparations quite successfully. After

transitory problems, fairly typical learning-by-doing behaviour and information

feedback accelerated the rollout, as the complex delivery system adapted.

43 More difficult, however, has been the problem of persistent political divisiveness that

has characterised public management of the pandemic. The US vaccination campaign

has been subsumed by the bitter culture wars raging between Republicans and

Democrats (see for example, French; Wagner; and Smith). Vaccination has been swept

up in Republican anti-government rhetoric and the refusal by Donald Trump and his

allies to legitimise the Biden administration by acknowledging the results of the 2020

elections. Republicans and media like Fox News have thus been undermining the

legitimacy of the vaccination campaign (Khazan). The result was a growing emergence of

vaccination hesitancy by the summer of 2021 in the face of clearly-effective vaccines

(Webber and Swanson). This began in part as local or state “bottom-up” resistance to

the Biden administration’s (“top down”) policies for tackling the Covid pandemic,

becoming a political-partisan issue, and contributed to the subsequent surge in

COVID-19 cases as the Delta variant spread, especially in many southern “red states”. It

was this situation which prompted Alex Azar to promote vaccination in his New York

Times article in early August 2021, though he also pointed out the unwillingness by Joe

Biden and Democrats to acknowledge the successes of OWS.

44 Complexity theory may thus help understand the initial weaknesses of the world’s

largest economy and health system in dealing with the pandemic and subsequently

developing its comparatively successful vaccination rollout. Donald Trump stands out

as one of the few political leaders who deliberately pursued a divisive approach to

managing the pandemic: for much of 2020 he did little to coordinate the US’s federal,

state and local systems of government around policies that could have acted as

attractors in dealing with the pandemic (such as wearing masks). Far from trying to

bring some coherence to the response of the US’s public-private and decentralised

health system to the pandemic, the Trump White House exacerbated controversies,

setting significant sections of US society on the path to vaccine resistance in 2021. The

launch and pursuit of OWS was therefore arguably a fortunate bifurcation point

following its own logic, with the development of vaccines being relatively isolated from

direct political interference by the White House.

Conclusion

45 Operation Warp Speed was in many ways a remarkable success. It supported the ultra-

rapid, international development of several vaccines in 2020, which were used to bring

down infection rates and cases of severe COVID-19 in the world’s rich countries in 2021.

OWS’s organisation was both focussed and flexible, bringing together several

government agencies — including from the US military — and very many private sector

actors. It may be seen both as government-led moonshot, and as a project drawing on

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competition among private actors to produce vaccines. There are thus lessons here for

how governments may organise ambitious public-private partnerships in meeting

specific challenges. But OWS was far more limited in time and resources than the

Apollo programme. Its objectives and successes were strongly focussed, while its

organisational structure was light. Moreover, much of the science used was already in

place, including mRNA technology. Broader, more complex objectives may be less

amenable to this approach: for example, an article published by Time in May 2021 calls

for a similar programme to tackle depression, based on the assumption that recent

science has established clear biological causes and treatments to address this

widespread and varied condition (Schrobsdorff). That may be true. Yet, as Kay has also

noted, the Nixon administration tried to fight cancer using the Apollo project as a

model… and failed because of the complexity of the disease (Kay 2021). “Wicked

problems” cannot always be solved — even by moonshot efforts.

46 The OWS experience also shows up the problems of moving from developing innovative

technologies to applying them widely across society, let alone throughout the world.

Even when the initial difficulties with vaccine deployment were overcome, the

resistance to vaccination in the US (and elsewhere) indicates the problems linked to

achieving broader changes, despite the tangible effectiveness of instruments (in this

case vaccines). Moreover, despite the evident successes of several vaccines and the

mastery of their production, the world’s rich countries have — so far — failed to set up

a worldwide vaccination effort (Brown). Estimates for the cost of a global programme

run to $80 billion, and much less if patents are released (Inman): though this may entail

risks to the quality of production. This would be far cheaper than the Apollo

programme, and would be in the rich countries’ own interests, for as long as COVID-19

rages across the planet the more chances there are for the emergence of new, hard-to-

treat variants. But the political will is lacking at present.

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NOTES

1. For a discussion of the Trump administration’s handling of the pandemic see Asthana (2021).

2. Dr Anthony Fauci is the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. He

was often seen awkwardly standing beside President Trump during his daily press conferences,

sometimes correcting the latter.

3. The various versions of the DHHS fact sheet (Explaining Operation Warp Speed) reflect the

changing dates of the 300 million dose target.

4. The risks of politicisation affecting OWS were discussed by Dr Moncef Slaoui in an interview

(in French) with Matthieu Mabin (2020).

5. The Conservatoire national des arts et métiers (CNAM) is France’s leading educational institution

for life-long learning.

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6. “The messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines contain harmless virus genetic material that codes for a

protein that is found on the virus’s surface. The body recognizes this protein as foreign and

initiates an immune response […] [T]he viral vector vaccines contain a weakened version of the

live virus that has most of the harmful parts of the COVID-19 genetic code removed […] [and the

p]rotein subunit vaccines contain harmless pieces of the COVID-19 virus (protein), which the

body recognises as foreign and mounts an immune response against” (Congressional Research

Service 2021).

7. “Pfizer n’est pas leader dans les vaccins, BioNTech est une start-up allemande, qui plus est

fondée par deux biologistes turcs immigrés ? Et alors ? (Pfizer refusera les financements, mais

pas une précommande de 300 millions de doses). Moderna est une start-up américaine dirigée

par un Français, et alors ? Peu importe qu’il y ait des échecs, y compris de Sanofi et de

GlaxoSmithKline […]” (Durand), translation mine.

8. The system’s name comes from James Tiberius Kirk, captain of the Enterprise in the original

Star Trek TV series.

9. This idea has been repeatedly asserted, amongst others, by the UN and its affiliate associations

like UNICEF.

10. For a presentation of how complexity analysis has emerged in sciences and social sciences see

Edgar Morin. For a general presentation of complexity and public policy see Nicholas Sowels

(2021).

ABSTRACTS

This article presents Operation Warp Speed (OWS), a federal government project launched by the

Trump administration in May 2020 to develop a vaccine against COVID-19. In contrast with the

often incoherent and sometimes reckless behaviour of President Trump during the pandemic,

OWS was a focussed and largely successful initiative to support vaccine research, manufacture,

and delivery. It contributed to the discovery and early deployment of several vaccines within a

year and paved the way for a comparatively effective vaccination campaign in the United States

in 2021, which later met popular resistance along partisan lines. The article examines OWS as a

public-private partnership to achieve a “moonshot”, drawing on Mariana Mazzucato’s work on

Mission Economics which calls for more pro-active government action to tackle major economic,

environmental, and social challenges. The article then qualifies the success of OWS as a

moonshot, pointing to the competitive market elements built into the project which also helped

ensure its success. Finally, this research strives to examine OWS and the US vaccination rollout

using complexity analysis, to give some perspective to the emergence of vaccine resistance

behaviour as of spring 2021.

Cet article présente l'Opération Warp Speed (OWS), un programme fédéral lancé par

l'administration Trump en mai 2020 pour développer un vaccin contre le COVID-19.

Contrairement à la réponse souvent incohérente et parfois irresponsable du Président Trump

pendant la pandémie, l’OWS fut un programme très ciblé et réussi pour soutenir la recherche, la

fabrication et la livraison de vaccins, qui a contribué à la découverte et au déploiement rapides

de plusieurs vaccins en moins d’un an. De même, l’OWS a ouvert la voie à une campagne de

vaccination relativement réussie aux États-Unis en 2021, qui par la suite s’est heurtée à une

obstruction partisane au sein de la population. L'article examine ensuite l’OWS en tant que

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partenariat public-privé avec un « objectif lune » en s’inspirant des travaux de Mariana

Mazzucato sur L’économie de mission qui prône des politiques publiques plus volontaristes pour

aborder des problèmes économiques, environnementaux et sociaux majeurs. Cette contribution

avance aussi quelques mises en garde contre une approche aussi ambitieuse, soulignant que le

fonctionnement de l’OWS s’appuya aussi sur les lois du marché pour le développement de

vaccins. Enfin, l’article cherche à examiner l’OWS et le programme de vaccination aux États-Unis

à la lumière de la théorie de la complexité qui fournit des pistes pour comprendre l’émergence de

la résistance partisane au programme de vaccination qui s’est développé à partir du printemps

2021.

INDEX

Keywords: Operation Warp Speed, COVID-19, coronavirus, vaccines, moonshots, disciplined

pluralism, complexity theory, public policy, Trump Donald, Mazzucato Mariana, Kay John

Mots-clés: Operation Warp Speed, COVID-19, coronavirus, vaccins, moonshots, pluralisme

discipliné, théorie de la complexité, politique publique, Trump Donald, Mazzucato Mariana, Kay

John

AUTHOR

NICHOLAS SOWELS

Maître de conférences HC/Senior Lecturer at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, member

of PHARE (Paris1) and associate member of CREW (Paris 3). He teaches English for economics,

political economy and developments in finance in the United States and the United Kingdom. His

research includes public policy, Brexit and finance, current issues in the evolution of capitalism,

as well as poverty and inequality in the United Kingdom. Contact: nicholas.sowels [at] univ-

paris1.fr

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Hashtags in LinguisticAnthropology: A COVID-19 CaseStudyV Shri Vaishali and S. Rukmini

1. Introduction

1 The COVID-19 outbreak and the eventual lockdowns have brought about ever-

increasing active social media lives. This can be due to the lack of physical

communication and the internet being the only space for communication, information

and entertainment. Ruzy Suliza Hazim (2020) has mentioned that “lockdown and self-

isolation has led to many people feeling trapped without family and friends. Being cut

off from human contact can be mentally draining.”(Tan 2020: 13). Digital adoption of

everyday life is the coping mechanism that people have identified to avoid the feeling

of being trapped. Anita Whiting and David Williams (2013) demonstrated the

importance of users and gratification theory concerning social media, and they found

ten uses and gratifications: social media interaction, information seeking, pastime,

entertainment, relaxation, communicatory utility, convenience utility, expression of

opinion, information sharing, and surveillance or knowledge about others. The above

ten uses or gratifications play an essential role in coping with COVID-19 lockdowns

across borders. From being one of the sources of such gratifications, the Internet in

COVID-19 days has become the primary source for the above uses. With the complete

dependency on the internet, social media, and digital gadgets for communication, an

overwhelmingly pandemic-related content is delivered across social media. So are the

hashtagged responses to the pandemic in social media.

2 Hashtags are usually a word or phrase preceded by the symbol ‘#’ used in social media

and digital platforms to find the content under a particular topic. Consequently,

hashtags organize the content for the users’ needs and help them get every possible

content regarding a particular theme or topic in social media.

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3 Interestingly, the hashtags’ organization and categorization roles help create a

community of content and services for communicative functions. The recently famous

#blackandwhitechallenge on Instagram is an instance of such communication and

community-building functions of hashtags. Michelle Zappavigna (2015) has found that

hashtags enact three communicative functions: marking experiential topics, enacting

interpersonal relationships, and organizing text. Eventually, the hashtags evolved from

being merely used for purposes like business marketing, categorizing and painting a

theme on content to become an expression by itself. Hashtags as an expressing device

help its users identify the tags as letters of various emotional mind spaces. The user’s

choice of using hashtags in places like WhatsApp stories where hashtags cannot be

tapped to see the other relevant stories is evidence of the identification of hashtags as

an emotional expression.

4 This widespread use of hashtags has escalated during the pandemic. As a result,

hashtags provided an exciting outlook for academics in understanding the pandemic

from the perspective of the humanities and social sciences. The common hashtags used

in Facebook and other social platforms, the content style in social media and trending

phrases and words related to the pandemic have been recorded, archived and analysed

in-depth (Zyot & Gazo 2021; Nikjoo et al. 2020; Cahapay 2020). Al Azzawi et al. (2021)

have studied how people ‘speak corona’ using hashtags in social media. The presence of

bots and other related conspiracies and misinformation using hashtags during

COVID-19 has also been studied in detail by numerous researchers (Hussain 2020;

Shanthakumar et al., 2020; Chen 2020). While multitudinous research inspects the

pandemic life recorded in social media from numerous perspectives, the position of

hashtags in understanding people’s linguistic behaviour during the pandemic is still

underexplored. The anthropological significance of the recent episode of COVID-19 is

unquestionable. The present research attempts to study the linguistic patterns of

hashtags from an anthropological perspective to understand people’s mind space in

social media during the pandemic.

2. Hashtags in Linguistic Anthropology

5 Linguistic anthropology is the study of human behaviour and culture from a linguistic

point of view. Duranti (1997) suggests that linguistic anthropology approaches

language through anthropological concerns. Further, he also clarifies the various

anthropological concerns linguistics can attend to: “the transmission and reproduction

of culture, the relationship between cultural systems and different forms of social

organisation, and the role of the material conditions of existence in a people’s

understanding of the world.” (Duranti 1997: 4) The primary objectives in linguistic

anthropological research revolve around the supposition that human language is a

thinking faculty and, therefore, affects their actions/behaviour. The agency of language

with an effect on human behaviour influences human habits, behaviour and culture.

Therefore, it largely relies on extensive data of what human beings speak and write to

study culture and behaviour (Duranti 1997). Such extensive characteristic of data to

study the linguistic behaviour of people concerning an event is innately available in

hashtags. Apart from the ability of hashtags in providing extensive data, the role of

hashtags in social media is naturally relevant to the scope of linguistic anthropological

studies.

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6 Further, hashtags carry emotive functions and perform as an expressing device. Saif M.

Mohamed and Svetlana Kiritchenko (2015) have explored the word-emotion

associations through hashtags and found that they can improve emotional

classification accuracy in a different domain. Consisting of only a few words, the lexical

structure of hashtags is unambiguous and straightforward. Various studies, including

Giannoulakis & Tsapatsoulis (2016), suggest that hashtags help accurately describe the

intention of an image which can be inferred through image annotation processes like

crowdsourcing.

7 The multidimensional features of hashtags hold the potentiality to participate as a

reliable source scientifically and academically. Studies investigating the functions of

hashtags find it helping in ideological construction, emotional connection and

community building (La Rocca 2020; Colleoni 2013; Papacharissi 2015. Such functions of

hashtags can further provide a linguistic window for anthropological studies, making

hashtags perform as a reliable source for linguistic anthropology. Duranti (2003) has

classified the evolution of linguistic anthropology into three paradigms. The first

paradigm of linguistic anthropology is formalistic, focusing on the grammatical

description, linguistic typology and classifications, where it shifts in the second

paradigm to focus more on anthropology. The third paradigm is more

anthropologically-oriented and brings up linguistic anthropological themes such as:

investigations of personal and social identities, shared ideologies, construction of

narrative interactions among individuals. Hashtags fall under the three themes above

as they build social identity and a community of shared ideologies by creating narrative

interactions among individuals.

3. Collection of COVID-related Hashtags

8 As set down by Hymes (1964: xxiii), the scope of linguistic anthropology can “include

problems that fall outside the active concern of linguistics, and always it uniquely

includes the problem of integration with the rest of anthropology.” Duranti (1997: 4)

has established that linguistic anthropology “does not mean that its research questions

must always be shaped by the other subfields in anthropology.” Therefore, the present

study aims to study the potentiality and usability of hashtags in answering the

anthropological questions related to COVID by studying the role of pandemic-related

terms used in the hashtags, segmenting the hashtags lexically, studying the meaning

and role of each word used in hashtags, and studying the socially and anthropologically

concerned COVID-related neologisms found in hashtags.

9 Identifying the hashtags that are directly associated with the lifestyle of people during

COVID-19 is a challenge. The virus has definitely brought unpredictable changes to our

lives and also to the vocabulary that describes our lifestyles. The usage of words like

quarantine, lockdown, pandemic have become more frequent in our daily lives along

with corona and COVID after the outbreak (Katella 2020). Apart from them, the usage of

phrases: oldnormal and newnormal to define the lifestyle pre- and post-COVID have

become popular too. Several studies started to use the phrase ‘new normal’ for

studying COVID and the lifestyle changes (Corpuz 2021; Cobianchi 2020; Xiao 2021). So,

we decided to identify COVID-related hashtags using the presence of these seven words

that were acknowledged to have been used in the context of pandemic in social media:

Newnormal, Oldnormal, Corona, Quarantine, Lockdown, Pandemic. Also, the study labels

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these words as basetags, by which we mean the formation of hashtags using these words

as a prefix.

10 We chose Instagram for our research as the medium to study the usage of COVID-

related hashtags and its linguistic anthropological concerns. 87 hashtags were selected

across the primary tags: #newnormal, #oldnormal, #covid, #corona, #quarantine,

#lockdown, and #pandemic. The hashtags across these primary tags were chosen based

on their popularity (which is determined by the number of its occurrences) and the

significance of the stemtags. The following are the hashtags chosen based on the data

provided by Instagram in July 2021. The column with the number of occurrences notes

its occurrences up until July 2021. A single post may include several occurrences of

these hashtags. The number of occurrences of the hashtags here directly denote the

popularity of hashtags and may not be directly proportional to the number of posts in

Instagram. The chosen hashtags were collected based only on the selected primary tags

and their popularity. The research does not attempt to bifurcate the hashtags spatially

or temporally, a task rendered impossible by the data source. Therefore, the analysis of

the listed hashtags focuses on the general impact of COVID-19 in social media through

hashtags and its linguistic anthropological implications through Instagram.

Table 1: Chosen hashtags under the base tag #newnormal

Hashtag Number of Occurrences

#newnormal 5.4M

#newnormal2020 367k

#newnormallife 98k

#newnormalwedding 125k

Table 2: Chosen hashtags under the basetag #oldnormal

Hashtag Number of Occurrences

#oldnormal 5000+

#oldnormaldays 500+

#oldnormalschool >100

#oldnormalvsnewnormal >100

Table 3: Chosen hashtags under the basetag #quarantine

Hashtags Number of Occurrences Hashtags Number of Occurrences

#quarantine 30.3 M #quarantinefood 312k

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#quarantinelife 12.7 M #quarantineartclub 304k

#quarantineandchill 3M #quarantinekitchen 224k

#quarantinecooking 800k #quarantinestories 182k

#quarantinebirthday 653k #quarantinechallenge 139k

#quarantineart 629k #quarantinefitness 127k

#quarantinedays 546k #quarantinecuisine 105k

#quarantinememes 544k #quarantinemeals 94.1k

#quarantineworkout 451k #quarantineparty 83.9k

#quarantinediaries 340k #quarantinemoves 63.3k

#quarantinebaking 338k #quarantinegames 59k

#quarantinemood 317k #quarantineradio 57.5k

Table 4: Chosen hashtags under the basetag #lockdown

HashtagsNumber of

OccurrencesHashtags

Number of

Occurrences

#lockdown 20.3M #lockdownactivities 112k

#lockdown2020 4.7M #lockdownchallenge 108k

#lockdownlife 2.2 M #lockdowndays 107k

#lockdowndiaries 406k #lockdownfitness 82.9k

#lockdownart 305k #lockdownrecipes 77.1k

#lockdownmemes 259k #lockdownsessions 63.6k

#lockdowncooking 238k #lockdownextended 61.4k

#lockdownwedding 196k #lockdowngardening 41.1k

#lockdownbaking 160k #lockdownhouseparty 40.8k

#lockdownworkout 130k #lockdownextension 36.5k

#lockdownfood 126k #lockdownmeals 35k

#lockdownfun 123k #lockdownagain 20.8k

#lockdownphotography 120k

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Table 5: Chosen hashtags under the basetag #covid

Hashtags Number of Occurrences Hashtags Number of Occurrences

#covid19 43.2M #covidkindness 229k

#covid 19.3M #covidcooking 201k

#covidwedding 477k #covid19news 108k

#covidlife 324k #covidiots 80.3k

#covidart 321k #covidphotodiaries 70.5k

#covidmemes 299k #covidclassics 20.5k

Table 6: Chosen hashtags under the basetag #pandemic

Hashtags Number of Occurrences Hashtags Number of Occurrences

#pandemic 4.8 M #pandemicwedding 53.7k

#pandemic2020 674k #pandemicbirthday 45k

#pandemiclife 531k #pandemicbaking 24.4k

#pandemicart 114k #pandemiccooking 22.1k

#pandemiccorona 60.3k #pandemicoflove 1000+

#pandemicparenting 56k

Table 7: Chosen hashtags under the basetag #corona

Hashtags Number of Occurrences Hashtags Number of Occurrences

#coronavirus 35.8 M #coronavirusmemes 529k

#corona 30.1 M #coronawarriors 208k

#coronamemes 2.3 M #coronavirusart 46.5k

#coronatime 1.4 M

11 Further, to approach the COVID-related hashtags from an anthropological linguistic

perspective, the study takes five of the ten variables that Herring (2007) suggested as

the social facets of language on the internet. Herring (2007) suggested ten social facet

variables: participation structure, participation characteristics, purpose, activities,

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topic, tone, norms of the organisation, norms of social appropriateness, norms of

language, and code. The study designates five of the above facets:

The purpose: to validate the significance of the words used in hashtags concerning the

pandemic situations.

The tone is the “manner or spirit of the conversation.” Here, the study takes this variable to

understand the nature of the neologisms and the emotive functions of the hashtags.

Norms of the organisation: to categorise the hashtags based on their lexical features and the

context.

Participation characteristics: to discuss the sociolinguistic aspects. With a human as the

participant, participation characteristics usually involves age, gender, cultural background,

etc. Here, as the study uses hashtags as the participants, it studies the word order, genre and

activities as the participation characteristics.

Participation structure: the number of participants in an interaction. Our study employs this

facet to evaluate the number of each hashtag on Instagram.

12 Duranti (1997) confirms that the role of linguistic anthropologists is scattered across

the spaces of everyday encounters, language socialisation, ritual and political events,

scientific discourse, verbal art, language contact, language shift, literacy events, and

media. By applying Herring’s facets to hashtags, the study verifies the scope of

hashtags in the above mentioned areas of linguistic anthropology.

4. Segmentation and Organization of Hashtags

13 The lexical segmentation of hashtags aids in studying their linguistic and emotional

characteristics. Different studies already suggest the methodology and framework for

segmenting the hashtags for sociolinguistic (Qadir & Elloff 2014) and computational

reasons (Reuter et al. 2016; Berardi 2011). Qadir and Elloff (2014) have proposed a tree

diagram method to break down the hashtags into individual lexical units for

disambiguating and analysing the hashtags’ emotional characteristics. Our current

study segments the hashtags into stemtags and basetags through a similar tree diagram

structure.

14 The study uses the term basetag to denote the pandemic-related terms found in

hashtags and collects the hashtags associated with the basetag. The chosen basetags are

#newnormal, #oldnormal, #quarantine, #lockdown, #covid, #pandemic, #corona.

Stemtags are the other significant words used in the hashtag, along with the basetag.

Hence the hashtags are segmented into basetags and stemtags with a tree diagram

structure, as shown in Fig. 1. The construction of the tree diagram is to help in

categorising the stemtags into different genres and contexts. Also, it extends its role in

understanding the relationship between the basetag and the stemtag.

•

•

•

•

•

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Figure 1. Segmentation of Simple Hashtags

Source: The diagram was made by the authors to illustrate the segmentation for methodologicalpurposes.

15 While most of the hashtags can be classified into simple basetags and stemtags, a few

hashtags are complex as they carry conjunction in them, as shown in Fig 2.

Figure 2. Segmentation of Complex Hashtags

Source: The diagram was created by the authors to illustrate the segmentation for methodologicalpurposes.

16 The above example does not take the conjunction as a part of stemtag as we consider

stemtag an exclusive content word intended to add a new aspect to the chosen

basetags. In hashtags like #coronavirus and #pandemicorona, the basetag and stemtag

are contextually synonymous. Therefore, they are treated as a single unit of a hashtag,

excluded from being segmented into base and stem. The other hashtags are segmented

into basetag and stemtag, and the stemtag of each hashtag is collected for further

analysis, as shown in Image 1.

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Image 1: Word cloud of the chosen Stemtags

The wordcloud created post-segmentation by collecting all the stemtags related to different basetags.

Source: The wordcloud was created after the segmentation of all hashtags with wordart.com

17 The stemtags are further categorized into distinctive stemtags and common stemtags.

The specific stemtags under the distinctive category is exclusive and more accurate to

the content. The distinctive stemtags are specific and unidimensional. These tags are

directly associated with the content, while the common stemtags carry words that act

as an umbrella term for a multitude of content. The distinctive stem tags include

#cuisine, #fitness, #gardening, whereas the common stemtags contain words like #life,

#days and #time that do not accurately describe the content of the post but are still

relevant, as shown in images 2 and 3.

Image 2: Wordcloud of Common Stemtags

The wordcloud shows the further classification of stemtags called ‘common stemtags’ identified torepresent generic content.

Source: The wordcloud was created after the segmentation and categorization with wordart.com

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Image 3: Wordcloud of Distinctive Stemtags

The wordcloud shows the further classification of stemtags called ‘distinctive stemtags’ identified torepresent unidimensional or genre-specific content.

Source: The wordcloud was created through segmentation and categorization with wordart.com

5. The COVID Lexicon

18 From an anthropological perspective, the vocabulary of people reflects the lifestyle

they have. J. K. Chambers argues that

People adjust their vocabulary, sounds, and syntax depending upon whom they arespeaking to and the circumstances of the conversation. Such adjustments are oftenlinguistically subtle and socially meticulous, and largely subconscious. They are nottaught or consciously learned, but are part of the innate linguistic competence ofall normal people. (Chambers 2007: 4601)

19 Chambers’ argument in the sociolinguistic context is valid from an anthropological

perspective too. The changes in people’s vocabulary due to the circumstances is crucial

for an anthropological understanding of the circumstances. This paper identifies the

basetags as a representation of people’s COVID lexicon. The study analyses the number

of occurrences of basetag to identify the preferred quarantine-related word for

hashtags in Instagram.

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Chart 1: Distrbution of basetags among the collected hashtags based on its occurrences

The pie chart depicts the distribution of occurrences of each basetags in the collected hashtags. Thenumber of occurrences of each basetag from the collected data is calculated to study the mostpopular basetag during the pandemic. In the identified basetags, #COVID was used in 34% theInstagram hashtags and occurred a total of 83.8M times, #corona was used in 28% of the hashtagsand occurred 69.9M times, #quarantine was in 21% of the collected hashtags with 52.8M totaloccurrences, #lockdown was in 12% with a total of 30M occurrences, #pandemic in 3% of thehashtags and occurred 6.38M times, #newnormal in 2% of the hashtags and occurred 5.9M times,and #oldnormal in less than 1% of the hashtags and occurred only 5.7k times.

Source: The chart was created by the authors to show the distribution of the chosen basetags.

20 The two basetags #newnormal and #oldnormal may not be considered as words which

can be directly related to the pandemic. But these basetags stand as a testimony to how

the pandemic affected and re-defined normalcy. The adjective new in #newnormal

defines the sudden change in the way of living while the ‘normal’ in #newnormal

emphasizes why this sudden change in lifestyle has to be normalized due to

circumstances. While #newnormal represents the life during the pandemic, #oldnormal

is a reminder of the life that was once lived before the COVID-19 pandemic. On

comparing the counts between #newnormal (5.9M) and #oldnormal (5.7k), we can find

that Instagram recorded the life during the pandemic more frequently than throwing

back to the nostalgic content of #oldnormal living in the context of the pandemic.

6. Hashtags and COVID-Lifestyle

21 The unidimensional, distinctive stemtags are specific and directly associated with the

content. The distinctive stemtags and associated hashtags are further analysed to

verify the potentiality of hashtags through the collected sample in answering the

COVID-related socio-anthropological questions such as:

How did the pandemic affect social events and gatherings?

What were the activities people were involved during the lockdown days?

Did people build a virtual community during the socially-distant lockdown days?

1.

2.

3.

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6.1. Hashtags related to Social Events

22 In the collected hashtags, a few carry the #newnormal definition of events that the

pandemic has brought. The sudden change of existing ideas and norms of events due to

the pandemic can be studied through this set of hashtags. Significantly, social events

like weddings or parties have donned a new-normal definition due to the social

distancing norms as weddings were restricted to 50 people or when New York Governor

Andrew Cuomo made it legal to conduct internet weddings. The stemtags associated

with social events like #wedding, #party, #houseparty, and #birthday carry a new

normal definition with the presence of the COVID-related basetags.

Figure 3. Hashtags and social events

Source: The diagram was created by the researcher for segmentation purposes.

23 The segmentation conveys that hashtags like #wedding, used for archiving or

journaling a popular social event like a wedding, don a #newnormal definition through

the presence of the basetag. The use of the basetag #lockdown before the stemtag

#wedding emphasizes the deviation of old norms in such social events and builds a new

genre for the event #wedding called a #pandemicwedding, #lockdownwedding, etc. The

#newnormal way of conducting social events is echoed in a few collected hashtags

listed in Table 9.

Table 8: Examples of hashtags that carry a new pandemic-related identity to the existing events

#lockdownwedding #lockdownhouseparty

#pandemicwedding #quarantinebirthday

#pandemicbirthday #quarantineparty

#covidwedding #newnormalwedding

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6.2. Hashtags in Everyday Activities

24 Other distinctive stemtags found mostly represent activities that can be directly

associated with people’s everyday lives. These set of hashtags can help understand the

set of activities done by people as recorded in social media during COVID as shown in

Table 10.

Table 9: Examples of hashtags that journals life during COVID

#pandemicart #pandemicbaking

#lockdownworkout #lockdowngardening

#lockdownmeals #covidphotodiaries

#lockdownrecipes #covidart

#pandemiccooking #pandemicparenting

#quarantinemeals #lockdownchallenge

#quarantineworkouts #lockdownactivities

#quarantinecooking #quarantinestories

#quarantinefood #quarantinegames

#quarantinebaking #quarantineradio

#quarantinekitchen #quarantineartclub

#quarantinecuisine #quarantinefitness

25 Further, the stemtags are categorized based on the activity they represent to find the

most recorded activity by people on social media during COVID (Chart 2).

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Chart 2: Predominant activities recorded in social media based on the number of occurrences ofthe associated hashtags

The chart explains that the majority of the activities-associated stemtags discuss cooking and food.33% of the occurrences belong to art and photography related activities, and 16% fitness and workout.Stemtags related to gardening and games have contributed 1% each in the occurrences of thecollected activity-related stemtags.

Source: The chart was created by the authors to show the distribution of the stemtags related to dailyactivities recorded using hashtags in Instagram during COVID-19.

6.2.1 Cooking and Food

26 The posts on cooking and food on Instagram or any other social media has been

popular even before the COVID period. The addition of the base tags help us identify

the content in COVID times. The study focuses on food-related content during COVID by

identifying the cooking and food-related stem tags. There is a multitude of stemtags

related to cooking and food in the collected hashtags. They include #cooking, #recipes,

#meals, #baking, #kitchen, and #food. From the collected data, the hashtags related to

cooking and food has recorded over 2M occurrences, representing 48% of the total of

hashtags referring to everyday activities.

27 Studying the hashtags related to everyday activities during COVID life with respect to

their number of occurrences is a window to know the booming interests of people

during lockdown. The analysis has provided us a clear picture about how food and art

were prioritized during lockdown — work from home culture.

6.2.2 Fitness and Workout

28 The stemtags related to fitness and workout are #workout and #workouts. The hashtags

related to fitness include #lockdownworkout and #quarantineworkouts. From the

collected data, the hashtags related to fitness and workout has occurred over 899k

times or 16% of the total.

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6.2.3 Boardgames

29 The stemtags like #games or #boardgames are used for recording games played during

the COVID period. From the collected data, the hashtags related to games have been

found to occur over 59k times on Instagram, representing only 1% of the total.

6.2.4 Gardening

30 Instagram archives the COVID time gardening using the stemtag #gardening, which has

occurred over 41.1k times in the collected data, or 1% of everyday activities.

6.2.5 Art and Photography

31 The stemtags related to art and photography include #art, #artclub, #photodiaries,

#photography. #covidclassics was found popular for recreating classic stories during

COVID. The art and photography related hashtags from the collected data occurred

over 1.9M times on Instagram (a visual-rich social media platform), or 33% of the total.

6.2.6 Parenting

32 The stemtag #parenting was used for recording the parenting experiences in the

lockdown period. The hashtag #pandemicparenting occurred over 56k times on

Instagram, or 1% of the total.

6.3. Hashtags in Community Building

33 Through using similar hashtags for a cause, hashtags indirectly create a community of

social media users. It helps create affective publics, which is a term defined by

Papacharissi (2015: 5) as “networked publics that are mobilized and connected,

identified, and potentially disconnected through expressions of sentiment.”

Sometimes, hashtags build an idea of community by involving people to participate

with a specified purpose through these hashtags actively. The stemtags #artclub and

#challenges have been identified to perform the community-building function in the

collected distinctive stemtags. These stemtags have collectively occurred over 551k

times in the collected set of distinctive hashtags.

7. Identified Functions of the Common Stemtags

34 The study identifies common stemtags (see Image 3, above) that are generic and

multidimensional. These are words that cannot be associated with a single activity or a

specific content. Although the stemtags seem to be generic, further lexical analysis of

the stemtags shows that they perform one of the three identified functions: archival,

emotive and reactive (see Chart 3, below).

35 Further, the number of occurrences of each stemtag is compared and analysed under

the hypothesis that the number of occurrences can help understand the most preferred

performative hashtags’ function during COVID.

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Chart 3: Functions of the Common Stemtags

The analysis displays that 75% of common stemtags are used for archival or journaling functions,while 12% are intended to perform emotive functions and 13% for reactive functions. Also, thisanalysis acts as evidence of people’s preference for using hashtags to ‘record’ their daily lives duringCOVID, which can be used as a source for anthropological studies.

Source: The chart was created by the authors to show the identified functions of stemtags and itsdistribution.

7.1. Stemtags that perform archiving functions

36 Stemtags like #diaries, #life, #time carry a chronicling aspect to the quarantine-related

hashtags. Through word choices like #diaries or #days, social media have consciously or

unconsciously journaled life during COVID. The hashtags associated with such stemtags

are called archival hashtags. Seven stemtags were identified to perform this function:

#2020, #life, #days, #diaries, #stories, #sessions, and #time.

7.2 Stemtags that perform emotive functions

37 Stemtags like #fun, #chill, #kindness, #love and #mood can be associated with the

emotive aspect of the content. Such stemtags act as a window to understanding the

lockdown-mind space of people and bring affective/emotive characteristics to the

hashtags.

7.3 Stemtags that perform responsive functions

38 Stemtags like #extended, #extension, #again, and #memes carry people’s reaction to

COVID-related lockdowns. Therefore, we identify them performing the reactive or

responsive function as a hashtag to COVID and lockdown.

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8. Neologisms in COVID

39 COVID-19 has brought numerous new words to the dictionary, from words like

Covidiots and Coronapocalypse that discuss COVID-related living, the #newnormal has

also brought strange neologisms including maskne, which is acne developed by the

regular wearing of masks, and quaratini, which is a cocktail had in quarantine. Al-

Azzawi & Haleem (2021) have listed neologisms related to the COVID-19 pandemic used

in hashtags. Our study focuses on the number of occurrences of these neologisms in

Instagram hashtags and further, study their popularity and functions. By number of

occurrences, we mean the times of recurrences of the hashtags in Instagram and it may

not be an equivalent to the number of posts. The following records a selection of new

phrases and words formed during the pandemic.

Table 10: Examples of COVID-related neologisms in Instagram hashtags

S.

No.

Neologisms in

HashtagsMeaning

Number of

Occurrences

1. #coronacation

The break from regular #oldnormal school and

workstyle that is treated as a vacation from regular

lifestyle.

198k

2. #Maskne Acne developed by wearing masks 178 k

3. #Quarantini Any kind of a cocktail drunk in quarantine 109k

4. #CoronapocalypseA word used to described the extreme social,

economic and political reactions to the pandemic.109k

5. #covidientUsed for describing a person who follows the public

health guidelines to save themselves from covid. 100k

6. #Pandemicbaby A baby that was born during the pandemic 97.1k

7. #Covidiot

COVID+Idiot, used for describing people that do not

understand the seriousness of the pandemic or do

not follow the public health guidelines.

53.9k

8. #quaranteenFor recording the lifestyle of teen agers during the

quarantine.32.9k

9. #coronacoaster Describing the ups and downs of pandemic. 12.2k

10. #InfodemicManipulation of information and inauthenticity

during the pandemic. 1000+

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11. #pandumbic

For describing someone who is ignorant of the public

health guidelines or lacks knowledge about the

pandemic.

500+

The study classifies these neologisms into contexts as describing the pandemic behaviour of people,describing lifestyle during the pandemic, describing the socio-political effects of the pandemic, anddescribing the pandemic in general. The hashtagged neologisms identified to describe people duringthe pandemic were #pandumbic, #covidient, #quaranteen, #pandemicbaby and #covidiot.Neologisms related to the socio-political effects of the pandemic were #infodemic and#coronapocalypse. Neologisms discussing the lifestyle of people during the pandemic were#quarantini, #maskne, #coronacation and #coronacoaster.

40 The role of neologisms in hashtags can be further analyzed in two ways: 1. Based on the

number of neologisms that occurred under each category. 2. Based on the frequency of

occurrences of the neologisms under each category.

Chart 4: Occurrences of Neologisms in hashtags based on their Categories

Based on the total number of occurrences, the lifestyle-related neologisms occupy 56% of the totaloccurrences, neologisms for describing people in the pandemic, 32%, and neologisms related to socio-political effects, 12%.

Source: The chart was created by the authors to show the distribution of functions of COVID-relatedneologisms.

9. Conclusion

41 Solving any anthropological conundrum accounts for its direct engagement with

human behaviour and lifestyle. The validity of anthropological findings and

speculations rely on the anthropologist’s sources and primarily on the extension of

first-hand anthropocentric information the anthropologist can collect. Therefore, it is

significant for anthropological data to be vivid, immediate, and empirical to perform as

a reliable research source.

42 By studying pandemic-related hashtags, we found that hashtags could record and

describe people’s lifestyles and social reactions vividly. This quality of hashtags make

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them an essential tool for digital anthropological studies. COVID-related hashtags

brought a specific hashtag genre to the social media database, reflecting people’s mind

space during COVID. Other than just performing as an expressing device, hashtags can

act as a digital repository for the times.

43 The linguistic analysis of the chosen COVID-related hashtags has provided a glimpse to

the lifestyle of people during this period of crisis. The results show us that social media

is frequently used during the pandemic for a multitude of purposes. The lexical

combinations of the hashtags and their number of occurrences have allowed us to list

the following findings with respect to the COVID lifestyle:

The presence of the identified basetags as a prefix to several common and distinctive

stemtags showed us the people’s approach to the pandemic lifestyle as a specific genre.

On comparing the counts between #newnormal (5.9M) and #oldnormal (5.7k), we found that

Instagram recorded the life during the pandemic more frequently than throwing users back

to nostalgic content of #oldnormal living in the pandemic context.

The study of the distribution of everyday activities in the hashtags showed that cooking and

food had taken a predominant space during life in lockdown.

The stemtags like #challenges and #club proved people’s initiatives to digitally build

communities in a phase in which social distancing became the norm.

44 Duranti affirms that

linguistic anthropologists start from the assumption that there are dimensions ofspeaking that can only be captured by studying what people actually do withlanguage, by matching words, silences, and gestures with the context in whichthose signs are produced. (Duranti 1997: 9)

45 The current study focused on how people treated hashtags and their purpose. Through

a linguistic analysis, we could find the following psycho-social dimensions of hashtags

during the pandemic. The segmentation and the comparison of the total range of

hashtags under each keyword helped us study people’s lifestyle choices and

preferences during COVID. Further, the frequency of the usage of pandemic-related

words in hashtags helped us determine that these words have become more common in

people’s everyday vocabulary. Also, through the performative functions of stemtags,

we found hashtags being preferred for people to journal or archive their own lives,

which can make the study of hashtags provide first-person information in

anthropological enquiries.

46 Segmenting hashtags and lexically analysing them provide significant help in

visualising vivid imagery related to the situation. Also, the unambiguity and clarity in

the hashtags make them a better repository of anthropological information, providing

a psycho-social and anthropological perspective to people’s lifestyles. Therefore,

hashtags can be treated as a potential data source to study the anthropological aspects

of a phenomenon.

47 Apart from a qualitative study of the hashtags through linguistic choices, the available

quantitative details, based on the number of occurrences of a particular hashtag, can

help understand lifestyle choices and other anthropological related information. For

instance, studying the count of different hashtags that convey probably opposite

meanings can help understand the stand of the majority in social media on a particular

cause or event. The potentiality of hashtags in many linguistic pieces of research also

extends their significance in studies across the arena of digital humanities.

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ABSTRACTS

Hashtags in social media reflect the Coronavirus pandemic outbreak and the consequential shifts

and swifts in people’s lifestyles. Several studies related to the pandemic have used hashtags from

linguistic, economic, and sociological perspectives. However, the potentiality of hashtags in

addressing the pandemic-related anthropological questions is still underexplored. This study

verifies how hashtags are primarily anthropocentric and can act as a source for anthropological

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studies. We have collected COVID-related hashtags in Instagram under five different pandemic-

related words like #newnormal, #oldnormal, #quarantine, #lockdown, #pandemic, #corona.

Eighty-eight hashtags under the mentioned pandemic-related keywords and 11 neologisms are

collected to analyse their linguistic patterns and anthropological implications. The hashtags are

segmented into basetags and stemtags to find the lexical significance of individual word units in

the pandemic lifestyle. The segmentation helped analyse the range of vocabulary in hashtags

used to describe people’s lifestyles during the pandemic. Hashtags are user-friendly and are

primarily used as an expressing and recording device. The archival and emotive quality added to

hashtags’ searchability and accessibility make them a potential linguistic anthropological

research source for the ’COVID-19 pandemic.

Les hashtags dans les médias sociaux reflètent l'épidémie de pandémie de coronavirus et les

changements qui en découlent dans le mode de vie de la population. Plusieurs études liées à la

pandémie ont utilisé les hashtags dans une perspective linguistique, économique et sociologique.

Cependant, le potentiel des hashtags pour aborder les questions anthropologiques liées à la

pandémie est encore peu exploré. Cette étude démontre que les hashtags sont avant tout

anthropocentriques et peuvent servir de source pour les études anthropologiques. Nous avons

collecté les hashtags liés au COVID sur Instagram sous cinq mots différents liés à la pandémie

comme #newnnormal, #oldnormal, #quarantine, #lockdown, #pandemic, #corona. Quatre-vingt-

huit hashtags liés aux mots-clés associés à la pandémie sus-mentionnés et 11 néologismes ont été

collectés pour analyser leurs modèles linguistiques et leurs implications anthropologiques. Les

hashtags sont segmentés en basetags et stemtags afin de trouver la signification lexicale des unités

de mots individuels dans le mode de vie en période de pandémie. La segmentation a permis

d'analyser l'étendue du vocabulaire des hashtags utilisés pour décrire le mode de vie des gens

pendant la pandémie. Les hashtags sont conviviaux et sont principalement utilisés comme moyen

d'expression et comme dispositif de consignation ou d’archivage. La qualité archivistique et

émotive, ajoutée à la facilité de recherche et à l'accessibilité des hashtags, en font une source

potentielle de recherche anthropologique linguistique pour analyser la pandémie de COVID-19.

INDEX

Mots-clés: hashtag, Instagram, COVID-19, linguistique anthropologique, Internet

Keywords: hashtag, Instagram, COVID-19, linguistic anthropology, Internet

AUTHORS

V SHRI VAISHALI

Research scholar from VIT, Vellore, working on a comparative study between Internet

Linguistics and the orthographic rules of Tholkappiyam. Department of English, School of Social

Sciences and Languages, VIT, Vellore, India. Orcid id: 0000-0001-7843-9521. Contact:

venkatshrivaishali [at] gmail.com

S. RUKMINI

Dr. S. Rukmini is Sr. Assistant Professor of English at VIT, Vellore. She has presented and

published over 30 research articles and projects. Her specialization is related to a cross-cultural

approach towards Indology and Digital Humanities. Department of English, School of Social

Sciences and Languages, VIT, Vellore, India. Orcid Id: 0000-0001-8414-3145. Contact:

rukminikrishna123 [at] gmail.com

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Pandemic Apocalypse In BetweenDystopias: Observations from Post-Apocalyptic NovelsMunir Ahmed Al-Aghberi

Introduction

1 In the wake of the COVID-19 viral pandemic (2020), interest in many apocalyptic

fictions, particularly movies, has bloomed since such works could make sense of the

real-life experience of the current pandemic. Apart from conspiracy theories which

have dominated social media, the partial fulfilment in real life of the fictional construct

of many of these stories has raised questions regarding the overlapping horizons by

which the literary imagination can collide or visit reality. Importantly, literature can

not only record the past but also envision the future to give our present some sense and

value. Any imagined future remains fictitious, however, insofar as it may or may not be

fulfilled, in whole or in part. The apocalypse is thus a possibility encased in a time shell,

and several elements in today’s world can pry it open. There remains the question of

whether the imaginative drive behind apocalypse fictions is motivated by an attempt to

subvert the existing order or by the hegemonic tools of the order itself which tries to

describe its collapse in terms of the end of the world.

2 Based on the above insights, the present study surveys a number of pandemic

apocalyptic novels, offering a comparative analysis of the dystopian elements which

constitute these post-apocalypse fictional worlds. The novels examined are set against

the backdrop of a pandemic post-apocalypse in the 21st century, although some of these

novels date back to the 19th and 20th centuries. The major challenge to this study has

been to determine whether applying a comparative approach proves useful,

considering the limited depth to which each text can be pulled apart to ascertain the

part the prevailing world systems play before and after the apocalypse. Given the

variety of novels which only share certain tropes highlighted by the study, we found it

more convenient to explore them under three headings: prescient novels predicting a

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21st century apocalypse, namely Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826) and Jack London’s

The Scarlet Plague (1912); Postwar and Cold War novels relating the plague to power

conflicts such as Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954) and Stephen King’s The Stand

(1990); and recent novels dealing with a biogenetic experimentation that leads to man’s

entrapped survival such as James Dashner’s The Maze Runner (2009), Margaret Atwood’s

Oryx and Crake (2004) and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2015).

3 Taking some Marxist views about power relations into account, the study compares the

social and political standpoints from which the future was viewed in these novels to the

present situation. It also highlights how the imagined future encompasses an implicit

critique of the present systems governing the world. The novels are imbued with

dystopian elements arising from the fact that the viruses causing the pandemics are

engineered by man. Besides, the study intends to delineate how the pre-apocalyptic

conflicts and leadership polarization get reenacted by the post-apocalyptic surviving

societies whose moral codes regress to primitive stages. It stands upon the observation

that the most dystopian practices of today’s world systems are unwittingly held up with

a sense of nostalgia over the novels’ various contexts.

Literature Review

4 The word “apocalyptic,” corresponding to Apokalyptik in German, was first introduced

by Gottfried Christian Friedrich Lücke (Collins 2014: 1) while discussing the Apocalypse

of John, or Book of Revelation. The term has been used thereafter in various scholarly

contexts to refer to fiction dealing with the imagined end of the world. Gaining an

increasing interest due to its popularity in recent years, apocalypse became a subject of

theoretical works that examined its genre, function, and types. In this context, Paul

Hanson proposed distinctions between “apocalypse” as a literary type,

“apocalypticism” as a social ideology, and “apocalyptic eschatology” as a set of ideas

and motifs (Collins 2014: 2).

5 Apocalyptic literature also gave rise to the post-apocalyptic text which imagines life in

the aftermath of an apocalypse, the causes of which range from possible natural

disasters and pandemics to man-made weapons of mass destruction or even alien

invasions of our planet. Hence, by envisioning the catastrophic end of human race,

apocalyptic novels tend to address significant issues and convey certain messages to

the contemporary politics and societies. In this sense, the apocalyptic literature is

defined in terms of its function as “intended to interpret present, earthly

circumstances in light of the supernatural world of the future, and to influence both

the understanding and the behavior of the audience by means of divine authority”

(Collins 2014: 5-6). This is, however, a parable-bound reading inclined to theologize the

discourse of representation and emphasize the final judgement of God as well.

6 Unlike the pre-modern approach, the modern significations of apocalypse suggest a life

shaped by crises that lead to the dramatic end of the world. In other words, the modern

apocalypse has something to do with the collapse of a universal order that fails to keep

up due to dystopian defects in its nature. The thematic concerns, nonetheless, are not

so much with the transformation itself as with the present problems causing it.

Apocalyptic literature, accordingly, functions as “a conceptual tool that projects an

imaginative catastrophic event onto a reality, through which questions of political,

economic, social, and cultural problems of the present era can be raised, thought, and

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answered.” It raises fears about the collapse of civilization so that “history can be

reexamined and human nature re-interrogated” (Moon 2014: 4). Kim Stanley Robinson,

the author of the alternate-history novel The Years of Rice and Salt (2002), traces the

paradoxical relationship between science fiction and reality, “Maybe we can say that

we need to see the real situation more imaginatively, while imagining what we want

more realistically” (Robinson 2002: 255). The apocalyptic imagination, according to

Joseph Dewey (1990) the American literary critic, represents an attempt by a puzzled

culture to set its “present crisis within a larger context,” to judge that it is “part of an

order as wide as the cosmos itself” which points “humanity toward nothing less than

the finale of its history” (Dewey 1990: 10).

7 Like the first wave of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic narratives arising in the 1950s

as a consequence to World War II, a second wave was revived in the 2000s as a result of

various political, environmental, economic and biogenetic factors: the 9/11 attacks and

the subsequent wars; the outbreaks of fatal viral pandemics such as AIDS, SARS, and

H1N1; the possible natural disasters due to climate change; and the ensuing economic

challenges and crises. These events signified dystopian flaws in the present universal

order that usher in a possible end of the world. Besides, they represent harbingers that

familiarize postmodern literature with the imaginative end of the world. In Jameson’s

words, due to extraordinary postmodern alterations “the apocalyptic […] diminishes

abruptly into ‘something you have around the home’” (Jameson 1991: xvi). Jameson's

view is part of a factious argument over the prevalent preoccupation with the motif in

contemporary fiction.

8 Taking Jameson’s familiarized apocalypse as a point of departure, the present paper

places the pandemic catastrophe within a broader literary context. Perhaps the

pandemic apocalypse represents the archetype of the genre as it reproduces actual

experiences that have radically threatened human existence at certain historical

junctures. The plague motif constitutes a recurrent theme throughout literary history

that reflects the people’s consciousness of disease as an existential threat. The literary

imagination of plague is rooted in the Greek texts, such as Homer’s Iliad and Sophocles’

Oedipus King, in which there is a causal relationship between plague and sin. In the

modern pandemic apocalypse, the sin-punishment causality is given an additional

dimension. The plague is not a punishment, but rather the sin invoked directly or

indirectly by man to handle a difficult situation. The result is a pandemic apocalypse

that leaves behind a prolonged dystopian society. Remarkably, each of the pandemic

apocalyptic novels discussed in this study has imbedded pre- and post-apocalyptic

dystopian worlds.

9 The literary dystopia designates a fictional future world within which a human

existence is extremely difficult due to political oppression, natural disasters, or

declining human systems. As a literary trope, dystopia has arisen in modern literature

due to the failure to realize a dreamt-of utopia. In Veira’s words, “Literary Dystopia

utilises the narratives devices of literary utopia, incorporating into its logic the

principle of euchronia […], but predicts that things will turn out badly; it is thus

essentially pessimistic in presentation of projective images” (Veira 2013: 17). Veira's

insight is rightly applicable to the recent apocalyptic fiction though his idea about the

pessimistic image seems too idealistic. In an interview, Robinson exclaims, "Doesn’t our

inescapable biological fate mean the utopia should always shade into tragedy?"

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(Robinson 2014: 248). Presumably, the human experience of utopia never goes beyond

the mere idea.

10 Historically speaking, dystopia is human whereas utopia is divine. Dystopian novels

depict more realistic images of humanity than the utopian ones as the problems they

tackle are rechanneled from historical human experiences regardless of how dark they

tend to be. Andrew Clements, the author of Frindle, stated “Perhaps the dystopian

stories of today are darker because […][a] study of the world history shows that truly

awful things have always happened” (qtd. in Nurhendi 2010: 19). When associated with

science fiction, the critical dystopia usually implies a critique that warns against

contemporary socio-political tendencies, with a central concern to provoke a reaction

in the reader to possibly help change the present (Armitt 2000: 194). Hence, the

dystopian future probed by the apocalyptic novels is no more than a temporal critique

of the present. In his study “Keeping the Lights on: Post-Apocalyptic Narrative, Social

Critique, and the Cultural Politics of Emotion,” Jeremy R. Grossman (2011) applies

Derrida’s and Jameson’s ideas to argue that “stories about the future and about the

apocalypse are strictly textual, and reflect current sociopolitical conditions rather than

attempting to prophetically envision the future" (Grossman 2011: iii). Although it is

often set in the future, the dystopian fiction is intent on addressing the

contemporaneous issues of human concern. The modern dystopian literature has

provided some satirical insights into the workings of corrupt, political and social

systems by casting somehow exaggerated future images of them.

21st Century Apocalypse in Prescient Novels

11 Anticipation novels written in the 19th and early 20th centuries represent the literary

prototype as well as a prophetic herald. Mary Shelley's The Last Man (1826) and Jack

London’s The Scarlet Plague (1912) indeed ignite the farsighted imagination of the

pandemic apocalypse.

12 The Last Man is an apocalyptic, dystopian science fiction novel first published in 1826.

The story is set in the late 21st century with a pandemic wiping out the world. Mary

Shelley proclaims in the book’s introduction that her novel is an edited version of a

prophetic writing that she discovered in the Sibyl’s cave near Naples in 1818. Taking

place between 2073 and 2100, the first-person narrative commences with political

events like the end of monarchy in England and the Turkish-Greek war and concludes

with the unknown plague claiming the world’s population as well as the appearance of

a false messiah. It ends with Lionel, the last man, living alone with a sheepdog as a

wanderer on the now-vacant continents of Europe and Africa.

13 The plague does not stand alone in the novel as a cause of collapse, but rather as a

consequence invoked by man’s endless desire to gain power at any cost. Small wonder

then that Shelley makes use of the term "labyrinth of evil" (171) to refer to the entire

state of affairs. The novel’s major conflict between the Islamic and Christian cultures is

nourished by the greed for power of such corrupt leaders as Raymond, whose quest is

not overwhelmed by the desperate condition of the world he seeks to rule. The account

sent by Karazza to Raymond is highly suggestive:

Take it, Christian dogs! take the palaces, the gardens, the mosques, the abode of ourfathers—take plague with them; pestilence is the enemy we fly; if she be your

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friend, hug her to your bosoms. The curse of Allah is on Stamboul, share ye her fate.(Shelley 1996: 150)

14 The germ of the plague, conjured in Constantinople/Istanbul (“Stamboul”), is carried

forth by the greed for power to the rest of the world, though it can be inferred that

Shelley blames the political interests behind conflict rather than a particular religion.

15 Envisaging the recent characteristics of viral pandemics, Shelley draws an air-borne

plague which is more calamitous since it is invisible and difficult to avoid. The wind,

which inspired the revolutionary spirit of the romantic poets, becomes a carrier of

death. In McWhir’s words, “Through such adaptation of familiar images, Mary Shelley

demonstrates that bad political and moral decisions render human beings complicit

with the external means of their destruction.” (McWhir 1996: xxxi). Nature’s wrath is

represented in the novel as a response to man’s evil impulses, “a tempest arose wilder

than the winds, a tempest bred by the passions of man, nourished by his most violent

impulses, unexampled and dire” (Shelley 1996: 231). Hence, the plague which becomes

an alternative agent of death assumes its air-borne form from the destructive interplay

of politics and cultures. The fatal plague can never be more harmful than man’s

institutional idea that he can build his own domain upon the ruins of others. In fact,

Shelley’s novel pries open the human shell coating a core of jungle law which is

discussed in London’s novel The Scarlet Plague.

16 Originally published in London Magazine in 1912, Jack London’s post-apocalyptic novel

The Scarlet Plague has been brought into the limelight again with the COVID-19 outbreak

(2020). The novel is overwhelming since it is prescient of the events that take place

over a century later and provides fodder to conspiracy theory supporters. The novel’s

fictional events are set in 2073, sixty years after an uncontainable pandemic known as

the scarlet (red) death has depopulated the planet. James Smith, one of the survivors, is

still alive in the San Francisco area. He travels around with his grandsons Edwin, Hoo-

Hoo, and Hare-Lip, who are young but with limited intellectual and language abilities

due to the primitive, hunter-gatherer type of life they lead in a deserted world.

17 The story of the apocalypse, the scarlet plague itself, is recounted in a flashback by

Smith—‘Granser’ as his grandsons prefer to call him—when he was an English

professor. The disease outbreak took place in 2013, a year after “Morgan the Fifth was

appointed President of the United States by the Board of Magnates” (London 2015: 19).

Victims would turn scarlet, particularly on the face, could not move their limbs, and

usually died within 30 minutes of symptom occurrence. Doctors and scientists not only

failed to find a cure for the germ-carried disease but died in the attempt.

18 The few survivors left in the San Francisco area are now broken into tribes and lead

Smith’s way of life. Smith’s main concern is that he has to carry forth the memory of

the pre-apocalypse civilization. His efforts, however, go in vain since his grandsons

ridicule the value of knowledge, social class, technology, etc. that he tries to pass over

to the young generation. In their eyes, such senseless stuff is as unbelievable as a myth

since they have neither seen that world nor even possess the intellect to imagine it.

19 London’s novel is focused on the social plague that accompanies the microbiological

one, one which proves worse. The real collapse of humanity is caused by social

injustice. This is expressive of the slogan stated by one of the characters in Robinson’s

novel 2312, that “social justice is a survival technology” (2012: 259). Many social entities

that have been always recognized as byproducts of capitalism arise during the plague

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and retaliate for the injustice done against them in a barbaric, evil manner. Like the

plague itself, they blindly attack perpetrators and innocent victims alike.

In the midst of our civilization, down in our slums and labor-ghettos, we had bred arace of barbarians, of savages; and now, in the time of our calamity, they turnedupon us like the wild beasts they were and destroyed us. And they destroyedthemselves as well. (London 2015: 105)

20 Berkove finds in Granser’s statement evidence of social Darwinism that generally

breaks loose during a moment of crisis.

Granser’s confession also exposes the pattern that the most advanced civilizationshave always had, and probably always will have: an underclass of relativebarbarians (“they”) and an [upperclass] of more talented and affluent leaders (“us”)that exploits and misuses fellow human beings from the underclass. (Berkove 2011: 136)

21 The logic of intra-class discrimination is a capitalist self-righteous pose to hint how

things would look like in case the underclass breaks loose.

22 Furthermore, capitalism is carried forth through objects with which it has been

inseparably bound. Standing out as a token of the pre-apocalypse dominating system, a

coin is the only monument left back from the ruined world, “a battered and tarnished

silver dollar,” to which the “old man’s eyes glistened, as he held the coin close to them”

(London 2015: 18). The coin, in this context, could be an object of nostalgia. Yet, like a

piece of a bomb in the bombarded site, it evidently stands for capitalism as the system

which was in charge in the moment preceding the catastrophe and, thus, responsible

for it. “In particular, in London’s opinion, capitalism led to the rise in population and to

overcrowding, and overcrowding led to plague. Consequently, capitalism is presented

as the ultimate cause of the pandemic and thus harshly criticized” (Riva et al. 2014:

1755). Surprisingly, Shelley’s and London’s novels not only set out the far-sighted

imagination of apocalypse but also insightfully diagnosed its underlying circumstances.

Power Conflicts and Moral Polarization

23 Postwar novels dealing with the apocalypse are noticeably charged with lingering

power conflicts and moral polarization. I Am Legend and The Stand project an image of

the post-apocalyptic world where the boundary between evil and good is clear-cut.

However, much road has to be travelled before a realistic civilization can be rebuilt.

24 I Am Legend is a 1954 post-apocalyptic horror novel by American writer Richard

Matheson. Though it was influential in the development of zombie and vampire

literature, the novel falls within the pandemic apocalypse literature. The central

character is Robert Neville, a sole survivor of a pandemic that has killed most of the

human population and turned the remainder into “vampires”. Set in Los Angeles, the

novel details Neville’s lonely life in the aftermath of the outbreak as he struggles to

study and find a cure for the disease. Meanwhile, he has to combat the swarms of

vampires haunting his house every night.

25 The novel is striking as it reenacts the plot of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe with a reversal, as

Crusoe leaves while Humanity stays, whereas Neville outlives civilization in its entirety,

and while Crusoe is responsible for his fate, Neville is a victim. The moral message

conveyed by the novel can be derived from the three categories of the pandemic’s

victims: the dead, the vampires, and the survivor. The normal mortal considerations

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are deconstructed as those less affected by the pandemic are those who have perished.

To survive is either to lead a cursed vampire life or to fight unaided against an

incredibly hostile environment.

26 Apart from the heroic role of the protagonist, the novel represents the survivors as

bloodsuckers who further the destructive power of the disease. Comparing the

vampire’s deeds to those of people, the novel contemplates the existing evils caused by

politics and the capitalist pursuit of profits.

The vampire may foster quickened heartbeats and levitated hair. But is he worsethan the parent who gave to society a neurotic child who became a politician? Is heworse than the manufacturer who set up belated foundations with the money hemade by handing bombs and guns to suicidal nationalists? Is he worse than thedistiller who gave bastardized grain juice to stultify further the brains of those who,sober, were incapable of a progressive thought? (Matheson 1997: 15)

27 Symbolically, the vampires in the novel render literally Karl Marx’s metaphor that:

“Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives

the more, the more labour it sucks” (qtd in Canavan 2014: 13). This implicit image of

the blood-sucking capitalism is, somehow, traceable in Stephen King’s The Stand as well.

28 Stephen King’s The Stand is a post-apocalyptic novel which was first published in 1978.

The plot centers on an influenza pandemic that kills almost the entire world population

except for few survivors who establish opposing social systems and engage in nihilistic

conflicts. The virus causing the infectious and deadly strain of influenza was, in fact,

developed as a biological weapon within a secret laboratory at the U.S. Department of

Defense under the codename “Project Blue”. It is accidentally released by Campion, a

laboratory security guard who afterwards runs away to avoid the other staff members’

fate. Campion’s unwitting step spreads the infection to Arnette, Texas, across the

country, and beyond US borders. It becomes an apocalyptic pandemic known as

“superflu”, “Captain Trips”, “Choking Sickness” or “Tube Neck” killing within a month

approximately 99.4% of the world’s population. The fatal disease results in an

escalating collapse of social, moral, economic, and health systems leading even

survivors to die from despair and acute sense of loss.

29 The survivors are divided into two polarized communities that echo the spiritual,

moral, and political dichotomy of the pre-apocalyptic world. One community settles

down in Boulder, Colorado, under the guidance of Mother Abigail, the spiritual leader

whose telepathic powers attracted many other survivors to join. The group attempts to

establish a utopian society that they call the “Free Zone” by restoring law and order,

bidding respect for Boulder’s native people and providing electricity to the town.

Meanwhile, in Las Vegas, Randall Flagg, the “dark man” possessing supernatural

abilities, creates his own society with people called by his visions. The people worship

Flagg as a messiah and joyfully submit to his fascist dictatorship. Flagg makes up a team

of previous criminals and abnormal people with the purpose of creating weapons and

preparing for a war with the people in Boulder. They start by staging an attack with a

bomb on the Free Zone’s leadership committee, killing many members. To retaliate,

Mother Abigail assigns the mission of destroying Flagg to a team who fail and are taken

prisoners by Flagg’s army. Moments before they are to be killed, an encounter between

“the Trashcan Man” and Flagg results in the explosion of a nuclear warhead—by “the

Hand of God” —destroying Las Vegas and killing all of Flagg’s followers.

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30 King’s choice of the title, The Stand, is suggestive in terms of imparting survivors with

free will. “Do you go full Darwin and indulge dark, selfish instincts or do what’s right

for the sake of others? ‘I wanted to write about bravery,’ says King. ‘At some point,

people do have to make a stand’” (qtd in Breznican 2020). In view of its moral conflict,

the novel counterbalances Flagg’s “demonic presence” and his “ability to bring out the

worst in his followers” against the angel-like world of Abigail (Breznican 2020).

Ironically, the author’s own stand toward both leaders remains ambiguous. Like Satan

in Milton’s Paradise Lost, Flagg is intended by the author to play his part heroically and

is granted a leader’s charisma in contrast to Abigail who shows weakness and

indecisiveness.

31 At the end, the main concern of Boulder’s society is reduced to the fate of Frannie’s

new born baby, and whether he is immune to the superflu since his death would mean

the end of humanity. The baby, Peter, eventually contracts and then manages to fight

off the superflu, a sign that marks the end of the pandemic but not the end of war. In

the novel’s epilogue, Flagg has survived the nuclear explosion, though he wakes up

with memory loss somewhere in the Southern Hemisphere. Regaining his former

strength, he gives himself a new name and begins recruiting supporters among a

preliterate, dark-skinned people.

32 Remarkably, utopian and dystopian societies are reenacted even after the end of the

world. Furthermore, some chauvinistic images can be detected in the novel: the evil

leader is ‘dark man’, he resuscitates in the south, and his new army is composed of

dark-skinned people. The novel’s ending note is that the world might not be destroyed

by a micro-biotic enemy, but it might by man’s insatiable appetite for power.

Conjured Plague and Trapped Survivors

33 The contemporary novels written within the first two decades of the present century

have a historical vantage point that helps them to see its atrocities with greater clarity.

The Maze Runner (2009) and Oryx and Crake (2004) address recent issues associated with

biogenetic experimentation by capitalist corporations that lead to the death of the

world’s population and the entrapment of survivors. Human beings are no more than

lab rats whose survival is no better than death in the catastrophe. From a postmodern

perspective, humanoid survivors outlive both the end of the world and, unfortunately,

their human nature. A similar existential entrapment can also be traced in Station

Eleven (2014), a post-apocalyptic novel by Emily St. John Mandel.

34 Mandel’s novel takes place in the Great Lakes region after the swine flu pandemic

known as the “Georgia Flu” has broken out, killing most of the world’s population. It

starts with the outbreak of the pandemic in Toronto. Jeevan leaves the city after the

death of Arthur—an actor playing the role of Lear—on stage and the subsequent death

of many actors and actresses attending the funeral within three weeks of the plague’s

outbreak.

35 The novel implies an invitation to break with the old world; meanwhile, the post-

apocalyptic era is not easy to live through. Kirsten, a member of the Travelling

Symphony tells her fellow survivor Diallo “the people who struggle the most with [this

current era] are the people who remember the old world clearly […] the more you

remember, the more you’ve lost” (Mandel 2015, p. 195). Apparently, the characters are

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caught in between a utopian world which is not reached and a lost dystopian one for

which a sense of nostalgia is stirred. This is further reinforced by the slogan of The

Travelling Symphony, “survival is insufficient” (Mandel 2015: 332). The slogan suggests

that to outlive the plague does not make any difference from death unless a real change

is made.

36 The novel moves forward twenty years after the pandemic’s “Year Zero” to record the

events involving Kirsten Raymonde and a nomadic group of survivors. Kirsten is

obsessed with Arthur as she witnessed his death. She keeps a graphic novel (a

metafictional subtext) given by Arthur before his death titled Dr. Eleven. The novel is

written by his ex-wife Miranda. Kirsten, along with others, have to leave the small town

threatened by the mysterious Prophet who rapes young girls whom he claims as his

“wives”. They fight with and kill him. Like the false messiahs who often prevail in post-

apocalyptic fictional societies, the Prophet is a lingering piece of the dystopian world.

In Leggatt’s words, “the patriarchal violence enacted by the Prophet offers an

unpleasant re-enactment of the religious fanaticism that has punctuated human

history” (Leggatt 2018: 2-3).

37 The prophet, however, presents himself to his followers as well as to readers as an

enlightened figure that attracts their attention to the pestilence’s connotations. He

believes that “everything that has ever happened on this earth has happened for a

reason,” including the Georgia Flu, which he sees as a “perfect agent of death [that]

could only be divine” (Mandel 2015: 59-60). He rhetorically manipulates his followers’

understanding of history and religion to convince them that he is a divine savior,

“The flu,” the prophet said, “the great cleansing that we suffered twenty years ago,that flu was our flood. The light we carry within us is the ark that carried Noah andhis people over the face of the terrible waters, and I submit that we were saved”—his voice was rising—“not only to bring the light, to spread the light, but to be thelight. We were saved because we are the light. We are the pure.” (Mandel 2015: 60)

38 The characters’ destination, thereafter, is the Museum of Civilization—the Seven City

Airport where passengers locked themselves down to evade the pandemic—to reunite

with the rest of the troupe. The entire world shrinks into a departure lounge where a

group of survivors could find a safe place. Such a claustrophobic escape reverts the

actual function of the places in the pre-apocalyptic world. By linking two eras, the

airport stands here for what is referred to in some critical contexts as ‘chronotope’

which plays a “structure-forming role” (Chernetsova & Maslova 2019: 44). Yet, it loses

its functional essence. The airport is a point of departure to the broad world or arrival

home. Neither of these, however, are associated with the place. It stands for becoming

stuck in the no-place.

39 The novel’s existential entrapment occurs at multiple levels: a group of survivors are

technologically trapped in The Museum of Civilization; another group are entrapped

within the violent regime of the prophet where he experiments his strange religious

ideas and sexual practices; and symbolically art, represented by the metafictional novel

Dr. Eleven and the Travelling Symphony, is trapped in the no-place.

40 The above existential dilemma is openly dealt with in The Maze Runner, a series of young

adult dystopian science fiction novels written by American author James Dashner.

Narrating the events in non-chronological order, the series consists of The Maze Runner

(2009), The Scorch Trials (2010) and The Death Cure (2011), as well as two prequel novels,

The Kill Order (2012) and The Fever Code (2016), and a companion book titled The Maze

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Runner Files (2013). Though the series is not apocalyptic per se, the apocalyptic themes

can be traced in the fictional background that is set after solar flares and coronal mass

ejections have scorched the earth. As a result, the governments of the world releases a

virus named “The Flare” to kill off some of the world’s population to save resources.

They lose control over the virus, however, which turns out to be highly infectious

causing its victims to lose their sanity and become animal-like.

41 Broadly speaking, The Maze Runner depicts a dystopian world caused by a natural

disaster as well as the governments’ ham-fisted treatment that only adds fuel to the

fire. Even the refuge called The Glade, where survivors are safely kept, is no more than

an existential trap, practically worse than death. As suggested by the title itself, in

order to survive one has to run and cross multiple places with fatal dangers. The worst

predicament, however, arises from the great gap separating what Sartre ontologically

describes as the ‘being-in-itself’ and ‘being-for-itself’ (1993: 18-28). The survivors,

robbed of their human consciousness, are like robots designed by sophisticated

technology to carry forth the seed of a vanishing world though they are completely cut

off from its memory. Thomas’ memory loss, for instance, illustrates the point:

His [Thomas’] memory loss was strange. He mostly remembered the workings of theworld—but emptied of specifics, faces, names. Like a book completely intact butmissing one word in every dozen, making it a miserable and confusing read. Hedidn’t even know his age. (Dashner 2009:15)

42 The artificial utopia intention of the Creators of the Glade is reverted into a dystopia

evacuated from the essential meaning of human existence. The characters have to

combat many external and internal obstacles just to restore their original condition

which, compared with the current one, becomes utopian par excellence. The events

allow us to wonder whether the novel communicates to us Reagan and Thatcher’s

slogan that “there is no alternative to capitalism” (qtd in Canavan 2014: 14). Like

George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1946) the utopia that animals dream and toil for turns out

at the end to be the one they have struggled to replace.

43 The novel’s idea is derived from a pure scientific fact: that a solar flare was predicted

by NASA to hit the Earth in 2022. James Dashner fictionalizes the Flare as a lethal,

airborne, highly contagious, man-made virus that settles in the brain, and developed

and released by the scientists of the self-crowned governing body referred to as

WICKED (World in Catastrophe Killzone Experiment Department). Its symptoms include

many mental dehumanizing disorders. To cope up with the pestilence, the people’s

social status determines their destiny: the poor who catch the virus become “Cranks”

and are doomed to death, whereas the rich who can afford the expensive drug called

the “Bliss” can live a bit longer. Importantly, both the drug and the virus are produced

by WICKED as a sort of business in addition to its main purpose of culling the world’s

population. While making profits from catastrophes can never hide the capitalist logic,

the idea of controlling the world population casts light on such western theories as

eugenics and practices derived from the inscriptions of the Georgia Guidestones, a

granite monument erected in 1980 which features 10 questionable rules “for an age of

reason” (see its Wikipedia description).

44 The most vicious part of the plot is WICKED’s physical and emotional experimentations

with a group of human ‘lab rats’. WICKED scientists work under the following motto,

“serve and preserve humanity, no matter the cost. We are, indeed, ‘good’” (Dashner

2009: 399). The slogan is suspicious since “they decide whom to serve and how to

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preserve as well as who will be the cost […] [T]he lab rats whether prisoners or orphans,

the secret government labs and the inhumane experiments are all historically

documented and have true foundations in reality” (Alkhafaji & Yaroub 2019: 1122,

1127). The use of historical facts as the base for the novel makes it even more relevant

as a fiction.

45 Remarkably, the pandemic provoked by genetic experimentation which occurs in The

Maze Runner preoccupies the fictional texts of other 21 st-century post-apocalyptic

novelists, such as Margaret Atwood’s 2003 novel Oryx and Crake which envisions a post-

apocalyptic world after a genetically-modified virus wipes out the entire population

except for the protagonist and a small group of genetically-modified people. The novel

is the first in a trilogy; it is followed by two sequels The Year of the Flood (2009) and

MaddAddam (2013). Set in a both dystopian and post-apocalyptic world, Oryx and Crake is

narrated through a third person retrospective perspective. To explain the events

leading up to the apocalypse, the novel’s plot comprises a series of flashbacks depicting

a world dominated by biocorporations. The main character Jimmy/Snowman thinks he

is the only human survivor along with a group of children who are the progeny of

biologically-spliced humanoids called Crakers. Moving back in time, the novel depicts

the pre-apocalypse events leading up to the release of the virus and the subsequent

annihilation of humankind.

46 Prior to the apocalypse, the ethical rules of biological engineering have been violated;

animal and human DNA is spliced to create new species. Biocorporations are no longer

satisfied with the present class system and think of finding an alternative to regular

humans. Furthermore, pharmaceutical companies resort to spreading disease within

their products in order to create a demand for more medicine. Crake, Snowman’s

childhood friend, creates a virus to kill off what he sees as corrupt humankind.

Imagining a situation similar to the present concerns, Crake believes that due to the

increasing population, pollution of various kinds would lead to a deteriorating

ecosystem. He comes up with the “Paradice Project” by which the entire human race is

to be replaced by Crakers. His “BlyssPluss Pills” plan works out, leading to the death of

humanity. Snowman, the sole survivor, witnesses the end of species “taking place

before his very eyes. Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species” (Atwood

2004: 344). Atwood envisions an advanced stage within the cycle of consumerism and

capitalism.

47 The Crakers are now to be the dominant species. Crake has conditioned their genes

removing aggression so that they will not have territorial ambitions nor will they

develop a hierarchical class system. Their sexual drive “was not a constant torment to

them” (Atwood 2004: 305) any more as the need to copulate has been reduced to the

basic biological urge of heats that they practice seasonally. Crake’s race is reduced to

the status of animals not only emotionally but also intellectually. Having a diminished

IQ, the Crakers are only concerned about survival and giving life to the next

generation. To avoid overpopulation, Crake has in addition “programmed” (303) the

new species to die at age thirty which detracts the time they may have needed for

intellectual development or even passing experience on to younger generations.

48 Crake’s project, nevertheless, contains an undefined moral code which echoes the

paradoxical nature of the capitalist ideology begetting him. He is part and parcel of the

capitalist corporations which destroy the earth with their ever-increasing demand for

production and consumption. Yet, he annihilates the world in the process of creating a

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specific race of consumers whose modified mental faculties cannot help them question

what they are consuming. Such an advanced stage of consumerism prefigures what can

be called the meta-capitalist apocalypse of the 21st century.

Conclusion

49 The novels discussed in this paper are all in the 21st century, whether written in the

19th, 20th, or 21st centuries. They predict our century to be disastrous as though the

literary imagination anticipated a climatic point beyond which history cannot go

farther. This vision might be clear to the contemporary novel provided that tomorrow’s

implications can be inferred from today’s scenario. Yet, one may wonder how the

present century is somberly assuming a form close to the one prefigured by the post-

apocalyptic novels belonging to bygone eras. Presumably, one could argue that the

social and political standpoints from which the future was viewed in previous ages

were similar to today’s, despite the fact that no logical argument can justify their poetic

vision.

50 Post-apocalyptic fiction necessarily envisions an irrevocable point in the future of

humanity. This future, however, is no more than a reflective outcome of the present

causes and complications. By addressing a problematic future, colored by the present

influences of power relations, authors are actually accentuating critical parts of today.

Hence, imagining the future that has never taken place except in text is no more than

going a step further in the critique of the present systems governing the world. If

socialism once developed into a horrible self-destructive totalitarianism, capitalism will

probably end in apocalypse. The man-made pandemic is engineered with the purpose

of harboring a utopian future, or so its creators might think. The event turns out to be

a dystopian catastrophe rather than a utopian revelation. Things might sometimes

escape mankind’s control and lead to disastrous aftermaths.

51 The apocalyptic texts examined in this paper reveal a late version of capitalism that

can sell its own deterioration along with the world as a commodity that resonates with

what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri call “biopolitical production” (qtd in Moon 2014:

615) This is a transformed state of capitalism—meta-capitalism—that outlives the world

and even the consumers who feed its very existence. It is named meta-capitalism

because it practices its own roles beyond the circumstances governing its being. Such a

critical consciousness might have inspired Jameson’s well-known observation that “it is

easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism” (qtd in

Canavan 2014: 14). No wonder then if a “tarnished silver dollar” in The Scarlet Plague,

like the Coca-Cola can in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), lingers on when the entire

world turns into ashes. They are tokens of the capitalist domination which not only

outlives the world but also stand out as nostalgic monuments and core carriers of

capitalism (thereafter meta-capitalism) over into the post-apocalyptic world.

52 The first and foremost dystopian element in the novels discussed arises from the fact

that the viruses causing the pandemics are summoned by man either willingly or

unwillingly. Whether the virus is released to cope with a problem, occurs due to a

scientific mistake, or is brought down upon humanity by man’s vices and sins, it

actually accelerates the prophesied end of the world. No world can be more dystopian

than one where people engineer their own self-destruction. In the aftermaths, the

surviving isolated societies, importing the pre-apocalyptic discriminations and

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maladies, reenact the past conflicts and leadership polarization of the pre-apocalyptic

world. It is this situation that paves the way for the emergence of false messiahs and

opportunist leaders who exploit the people’s spiritual void and reproduce corrupt

governing systems. Besides, the human moral codes regress to primitive stages as

culture and civilization are replaced by nature and “the survival of the fittest”. It even

leads to the most brutal versions of degradation and dehumanization. Imperialism, in

the present sense of the concept, no longer exists, as smaller communities and even

individuals play the part of empires. They think they can survive only through

expansion and displacement over the neighboring communities or individuals.

Metaphorically, the post-pandemic worldwide graveyard is still the object of the few

survivors’ conflicting interests and desire for power.

53 Thus, the most dystopian practices of today’s world systems along with its

sophisticated technologies are held up with a sense of nostalgia when compared with

the outcome of the apocalypse. In almost all novels, the ending notes give a misty and

unresolved code about the future of mankind. Implicitly, the surviving masses’

worldview is too myopic to look beyond survival. They can manage their own affairs

yet can never do without the ruling class or, to use Noam Chomsky’s words, the

“business groups” (1997: 14) whose absence from the post-apocalyptic scenery is

paradoxically more present than the apocalypse itself.

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Robinson, Kim Stanley. “Afterword: Still, I’m Reluctant to Call This Pessimism. Interview by Gerry

Canavan.” In Green Planets; Ecology and Science Fiction Eds. Gerry Canavan and Kim Stanley

Robinson. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 2014. 243-60.

Robinson, Kim Stanley. 2312. London: Orbit Books, 2012.

Sartre, Jean-paul. Being And Nothingness [1943]. Trans. Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Washington

Square, 1993.

Shelley, Mary. The Last Man [1826]. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 1996.

Veira, Fatima. Dystopia(n) Matters: On the Page, On Screen, On Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars

Publishing, 2013.

ABSTRACTS

Investigating the novels that deal with a pandemic apocalypse, this study highlights the

dystopian elements preceding and following the end of the world. Inspired by the COVID-19

pandemic in the 21st century, it relates the fears of the pandemic to the literary history and

political conditions nurturing that imagined end of the world in a number of post-apocalyptic

novels. The novels are examined under three tropes: the early novels prophesying a 21st-century

apocalypse; the postwar novels linking the plague to power conflicts; and the recent novels

tackling biogenetic experimentation. The study pulls apart, with a limited depth, the parts

played by the political and economic world systems in bringing about the pandemic apocalypse

as well as the dystopian aftermaths. It concludes that although the novels lash a critique against

capitalist recklessness, they ambivalently suspect the existence of a viable alternative.

En examinant les romans qui évoquent une apocalypse pandémique, cette étude met en lumière

les éléments dystopiques qui précèdent et suivent la fin du monde. Inspirée par la pandémie de

COVID-19 au XXIe siècle, elle met en relation les craintes de la pandémie avec l'histoire littéraire

et les conditions politiques qui nourrissent cette fin du monde imaginée dans un certain nombre

de romans post-apocalyptiques. Les romans sont examinés sous trois angles : les plus anciens

romans prophétisant une apocalypse au XXIe siècle, les romans d'après-guerre liant la peste aux

conflits de pouvoir et les romans les plus récents abordant l'expérimentation biogénétique.

L'étude examine, de manière restreinte, les rôles joués par les systèmes politiques et

économiques mondiaux dans l'apocalypse pandémique ainsi que les séquelles dystopiques. Elle

aboutit à la conclusion que, bien que les romans critiquent la folie capitaliste, ils doutent de de

l'existence d'une alternative viable.

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INDEX

Keywords: pandemic, apocalypse, dystopia, post-apocalypse, novel, COVID-19, capitalism,

Shelley Mary, Atwood, Margaret, London Jack, Mandel Emily St. John, Matheson Richard, King

Stephen, Dashner James

Mots-clés: pandémie, apocalypse, dystopie, post-apocalypse, roman, COVID-19, capitalisme,

Shelley Mary, Atwood, Margaret, London Jack, Mandel Emily St. John, Matheson Richard, King

Stephen, Dashner Jamesen

AUTHOR

MUNIR AHMED AL-AGHBERI

Associate Professor of English Literature and Criticism, Albaydha University. Email: maghberi [at]

yahoo.com

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Varia

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An A or Your Life!Some assessment issues on a tobacco-free, but gun-friendly, campus inthe United States

Claire Tardieu

Figure 1: The University of Texas (UT) at Austin: Main campus with UT Tower

Source: https://news.utexas.edu/2017/05/04/bridging-barriers/ Introduction

Introduction

Preliminary remarks on assessment

1 In the field of testing, four main criteria have been set to guarantee the quality of the

results (Benson 1998; McMillan 1999; ALTE 2011; Markle & al. 2014). A good test must be

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feasible, which means that the material conditions are met. Secondly, it must be valid

(Cronbach et Meehl 1955; Bolton 1987; Bachman 1990; 2007; Brown 1996; Benson 1998;

Mc Millan 1999; Alderson 2000; McNamara 2000; ALTE 2011; Markle & al. 2014). Validity

considers the construct of the assessment in terms of content and structure. It means

that the test must focus on the knowledge or skills that are being tested by the

evaluation itself. Validity also has to do with interpretation, such as professional

judgment. Face validity, i.e. the appearance of the test, is not enough: “Validity refers

to the appropriateness of the inferences, uses, and consequences that result from the

assessment” (McMillan 1999: 5). A test must also be reliable: “Reliability is concerned

with the consistency, stability, and dependability of the scores” (McMillan 1999: 6). This

means that a reliable evaluation will yield the same results when repeated.

2 Finally, fairness must be considered: a fair assessment is not biased or in favor of one

subgroup of test-takers (genre, ethnicity, and so on) over another. In other words, “a

fair assessment is one that provides an equal opportunity to all students to

demonstrate achievement” (McMillan 1999: 7).

3 It may also be useful to distinguish between “low stakes assessments,” those that

evaluate the institution and not the test takers per se, or “planning classroom

interventions for individual students”, and “high stakes assessments”, those “with

consequences for the assessed” (Mehrens 1998: 4). In the following study, high stakes

assessments are involved within the context of institutional assessments in a public

American university, the University of Texas at Austin (UTA). Although exams are not

meant to be scientifically certified in the same way as language tests, it seems that the

very concepts of feasibility, validity, reliability, and fairness should not be overlooked

when one deals with assessments within the context of higher education which

involves considerable investment on behalf of the students, particularly in the United

States with its high tuition costs, with huge consequences on their future.

Context

4 When I first set foot on UTA’s campus, on January 13, 2019, I must confess that

designing a feasible, valid, reliable, and fair assessment of my students for my two

classes on British poetry was not particularly on my mind.1 I wanted to immerse myself

in the beauty and freedom of this open-air campus, where lofty trees compete with the

roofs of neo-classical buildings.

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Figure 2: Calhoun Hall

Source: https://utdirect.utexas.edu/apps/campus/buildings/nlogon/maps/UTM/CAL/

5 On that first day, in Calhoun Hall (Figure 2), home to the English department, I received

a warm welcome from the Head of the department and staff. A technician guided me

around the building in which my two classes were to take place: in each room, a

computer was awaiting me with all sorts of peripheral devices, among which a

document viewer and every manner of adaptors forming a sort of clawed paw. I wished

we had all these conveniences in the French university where I normally work, not to

mention the size of the office, to which I had just been given the key. Then I suddenly

remembered the students’ tuition fees in the United States which were skyrocketing —

about $15,000 per year for a Texan student, and twice as much for an out-of-state

student.

6 There were free buses, bikes, free repairs, huge trees (not the kind they are planting in

France) allowed to grow as they wish, mockingbirds, and squirrels everywhere. And no

security guards to whom one had to prove one’s right to be there. I will miss all of this

on my return to France, I thought, feeling nostalgic already.

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Figure 3: The Harry Ransom Center

Source: https://www.austinchronicle.com

7 On the other side of Calhoun Hall, like the Cullinan in the Tower of London, the Harry

Ransom Center (Figure 3), a literary jewel set in its green velvet case, which gave you

access to all sorts of old and recent manuscripts and works of art from writers and

artists from all over the world. A heaven and haven for researchers. La vraie vie! True

life no longer existed elsewhere. Only the here and now in this literary sanctuary.

8 I would like to mention one more thing that I did not immediately notice on my first

day on the campus: there was no smoke in the vicinity. Then I saw it: the sign saying

that UTA was a “Tobacco-free campus”.

Figure 4: Tobacco-Free Campus Sign

Source: https://www.facebook.com/TacosNotTobacco/

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9 You could have added in a tobacco-free city (I can count on two hands the number of

times I could smell cigarette smoke during my 6-month stay). “Tobacco-free, but not

gun-free” I was told from the very beginning. Here we are. Is it not frightening to think

that one of your students might have a gun?

10 If any problem occurs, such as a robbery at a near-by shop, one immediately gets a

message on one’s smartphone calling for witnesses; about one hour later, another

message comes as a relief: a suspect has been arrested. “Thank you to everybody for

your help”, says the police officer — the campus has its own police station. For a French

person like me, this fact alone was quite surprising since police are usually not

welcome on French campuses. In Austin, however, everyone still had the 1966 Tower

shooting in mind in which 14 people were killed. In June 2015, after another shooting at

a university in Oregon, the Texas Legislature passed a law authorizing ‘concealed carry’

on campus, i.e. people were allowed to carry concealed guns. UTA’s President and

Board were firmly against this decision, but they had to comply because UTA depended

on state subsidies.

11 The city of Austin remains a Democratic oasis in an ocean of Republicans and other

NRA supporters.

12 That is the situation. It’s best to be in the know.

The Exam Issues

13 Even if the exam issue was not on my mind on that first day on campus, it had been

there a while before. I had to send in my class descriptions a year in advance, including

detailed requirements (uploading the full schedule and the dates of when all the exams

were due only a few days before the beginning of the semester). The online course

description was of great help.

14 As I was given the opportunity to spend an entire semester teaching in an American

university, I thought it would be interesting to compare the way American and French

students were assessed, specifically with exams. Starting with the peculiarities of my

own university, in which students are expected to hand in at least two papers per class

(usually prepared in class, not at home), where attendance is optional, and marking

traditional French (using a scale going from 0, the lowest mark, to 20), I wondered

about the special features of assessments at UTA. How many papers did the students

usually have to hand in, and what types were required (essays, reading reports, quizzes,

oral presentations, etc.)? Were attendance and participation compulsory and part of

the overall final grade? What percentage of the final grade were the essays worth? To

what extent were some procedures implemented, including peer review, revision

opportunities, and tier-grading?

15 I had not thought of the “safety issue”, with students being allowed to carry guns on

campus. I decided to add this dimension to my research questions.

Research questions

16 What are the main features of assessments in the English department at the University

of Texas at Austin (UTA)? Are there any factors (such as money, the presence of

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firearms, or grade expectations for courses in the Humanities) that put pressure on

professors and force them to raise grades to avoid confrontational situations?

Outline

17 This paper will more precisely address issues regarding the organization of exams in

terms of the number of papers, requirements, and grading in the English department at

UTA for undergraduate students during the 2019 Spring semester.

18 Methodologically, I will first analyze the online descriptions of all the English courses

offered that semester. This quantitative analysis will highlight the main features of

assessments in the context of this university and make it possible to confront them

with the issues of reliability and fairness. Then, I will conduct a qualitative analysis of

six interviews with professors who explain how they evaluate and grade their students.

This second type of data analysis makes it possible to discuss the validity of the

construct and, to some extent, the issue of proper grading. To what extent do the

interviewees feel forced to raise grades and why? Is the gun issue a relevant factor?

19 Finally, I offer a case study which focuses on an upper-division course of English

Romantic Poetry given by the present researcher to a class of 26 students, including

first-year (freshmen) to fourth-year (senior) undergraduate students majoring in

English or other subjects. This will offer some ways to answer the second question, that

of formatting a valuable course that results in higher grades.

Analysis of online course descriptions regardingassessments

Brief overview of the English department

20 UTA has over 51,000 students and 3,000 teaching faculty, with an alumni base of 480,000

people. It is oriented towards the sciences, humanities, and the arts. According to U.S.

News & World Report, UTA is one of the top 20 public universities in the country and has

top graduate programs in accounting, Latin American history, and petroleum

engineering — in addition to more than 15 undergraduate programs and more than 40

graduate programs ranked in the top 10 nationally (see the university website’s ‘facts

and figures’ page). The English program is not the most prominent program in terms of

the number of students: students enrolled in English classes for the 2019 Spring

semester represented by 3,709 seats (early-semester enrolment snapshot), including

undergraduate and graduate courses); nor is it the most important in terms of faculty

(108 members: 34 professors, 31 associate professors, 4 assistant professors, 1

instructor, 2 senior lecturers, 6 lecturers, and 30 professors emeriti). Still, UTA’s

English department has a strong tradition in Literature and Creative writing (including

some well-known authors who teach there).

Results

21 Here are the results of our quantitative analysis of the online descriptions of all

undergraduate English courses for the 2019 Spring semester in terms of requirements

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and grading. Overall, 84 lower-division and upper-division courses (including creative

writing) have been analysed considering four dimensions:

Number of essays (papers)

Other types of assessments (quizzes, reports, oral presentations, etc.)

Participation and attendance

Indication of peer review and revision policy

22 Our purpose was to describe the overall exam policy within the department and to

determine to what extent it contributed to enhancing quality assessments.

Number of essays

23 Although written assignments can take different forms, essay-writing remains the

paragon of academic assessment.

Figure 5: Number of essays per course

*This figure does not include the professional outcomes class, which focuses on writing CVs and oralpresentations, nor the creative writing and rhetoric courses, which require a written assignment forevery class.

Source: Claire Tardieu.

24 In 41% of the courses, students had to submit three essays. The number of courses with

fewer or more than three essays is evenly distributed (29% and 30%). Essay-writing is

worth, on average, 64% of the final grade.

Attendance and participation

1.

2.

3.

4.

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Figure 6: Compulsory attendance and participation

Source: Claire Tardieu.

25 The importance of attendance and participation was specified in 60% of the course

descriptions, while only 24% did not mention it. The remaining 17% of the courses, for

which attendance and participation were implicitly crucial, were creative writing and

rhetoric courses. On the whole, 76% included this requirement.

26 The average percentage of attendance and participation in the final grade amounted to

17.5%.

27 Along with essay writing, students had to submit other types of papers: quizzes, short

assignments, presentations, annotated bibliography, etc.

Figure 7: Other types of requirements

Source: Claire Tardieu.

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28 Only 10.5% of the courses did not mention other types of assessments. At least one

other type was indicated in 34.5% of courses, two to four in 36%, and five or more in

19%. This shows that essays are not the sole mode of assessment and it demonstrates

how professors vary their assignments creatively.

29 The average percentage of other types of assessments in the final grade amounts to

17.5%.

Peer review and revision

Figure 8: Peer-review and revision policy

Source: Claire Tardieu.

30 Regarding peer review and revision policy (the possibility given to students to improve

their papers and get a higher grade), 51% of the courses did not mention it, 30%

explicitly mentioned it, and 19% mentioned it implicitly (especially for creative writing

and rhetoric courses in which students are invited to share their productions and

continuously revise them).

Conclusion

31 In almost 80% of the courses, final grades include attendance and participation. Still, it

represents only 17.5% of the final grade.

32 Essays (three per semester on average) remain the most important type of assignment

in the final grade, worth on average 64% of the final grade.

33 Giving other types of assignments is the norm (only 11% do not mention it) but holds

only a minor part of the final grade (17.5%), the same percentage as attendance and

participation.

34 Peer reviews and a revision policy are the norms for nearly the majority of the courses,

at 49%, although it is not necessarily mentioned in the grading policy but often appears

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in the course description. When taking this remark into account, the percentage rises

to more than 52%.

35 To further understand the ins and outs of the exam policy in the English department at

UTA, I conducted six semi-directed interviews of six different professors, yielding a

corpus of 3.33 hours of audio recordings.

Analysis of the six professors’ interviews

The interviewees

36 The professors were chosen for the originality of their course description available

online, and, more specifically, for some peculiarities including:

Peer review and revision

Take-home final exam

Grade tiers

Grading.

37 The professors had different profiles, as outlined in Table 1.

Table 1: The profiles of the six professors interviewed

Course code and title

Professor

(M: Male; F:

Female)

Position

Teaching

experience at

UTA

Interview

date and

length

E329R The Romantic

PeriodProf.1 M

Post-Doctoral lecturer

Finished PhD in the

previous year

Less than a year11 March 2019

14’37”

380F Literature for

WritersProf.2 M Associate professor 15 years

12 March 2019

45’22”

343L, Modernism and

LiteratureProf.3 F

Post-doctoral Lecturer

Finished PhD in the

previous year

7 years13 March 2019

37’14”

338E, British

Literature: Victorian

through WWII

Prof.4 F

Post-doctoral lecturer

Finished PhD in the

previous year

7 years14 March 2019

29’07”

371K, Modern and

Contemporary PoetryProf.5 M

Assistant professor

Promoted to Professor9 years

8 April 2019

23’38”

364T Eng Lang & Its

Social ContextProf.6 F

Associate professor of

English, rhetoric, and

writing, semi-retired

35 years11 April 2019

25’42”

1.

2.

3.

4.

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38 One may note that all but one had a minimum of 7 years of teaching experience at UTA.

Even Prof.1 is not a novice teacher, however, having had three years of prior teaching

experience at the University of Pennsylvania.

The questions

39 Each interviewee was asked the same 8 questions. The first four questions dealt with

their personal and professional data, the next four focused on special features in their

way of assessing students, and the last one centered on the grading issue without

mentioning the 2015 gun law directly.

Gender

Position/status

Length of service at UTA

Courses taught

Mode of assessment

Mode of grading

Peer review and revision policy

Higher grades in the Humanities

Data analysis

40 The interviews yielded four main aspects for analysis: peer review and revision policy,

take-home final exam, specification grading, and overall grading.

Peer review and revision

41 Prof.1 explained that he uses peer review before and after handing in papers, especially

for his classes with the “writing flag”, which is part of UTA’s Core Curriculum

Requirements and involves a lot of writing. He highlighted the importance of providing

detailed notes in the margins of the essay as well as final summative comments. The

students first get a tentative grade, and then, after revising their paper, a final grade.

42 One sustains the impression that Prof.1 is concerned with training his students until he

can proceed to a summative assessment and grade. In other words, formative

assessment is the whole process, even for exams.

43 Prof.2, who teaches creative writing, went even further by saying that failure is part of

the assessment: “It is in this context, obviously, a very subjective assessment. And I

think I need to leave room for that, and I have some students who are experimenting,

and you know, experiments often fail.”

44 According to him, peer-review in groups of 3 or 4 before they hand in their paper is

what brings the objective into the subjective, especially when it involves reading short

critiques prepared by the other students. Still, it is a delicate operation, because

writing fiction involves emotions and personal feelings: “And the peer review is that

it’s incredibly difficult, particularly when you’re attached to the material in some

emotional way, [it’s] incredibly difficult to discern if something is good and something

maybe needs to be redirected.” However, by being trained to critique one another, in

the end, he says, the students develop self-reflection.

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

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45 These two samples put our French system into question, in which continuous

assessment (at least 2 papers per class) does not seem to allow peer-review and/or

revision, nor the possibility to give tentative grades, except in particular situations.

Take-home final exam

46 Prof.1’ described as follows his assessment procedure:

Class preparation and participation: 10%;

Weekly discussion posts: 30%;

Short paper: 20%;

Final Exam (take-home): 40%.

47 In my French university, due to different events (student strikes followed by the COVID

crisis), exams have been carried out online for the past two years, which has been a

negative experience according to the majority of professors. One main reason for this

negative opinion is the risk of cheating and plagiarism.

48 Contrary to this experience, Prof.1 said that at UTA:

Plagiarism is rare. It has often been students that are struggling in the class and arejust trying to sort of find the easiest way of dealing with this problem. I haven’treally found issues of plagiarism. Especially because they are fully aware that whenthey submit it on Canvas [a CMS equivalent to Moodle], there is often a plagiarismdetection software on Canvas.

49 This denotes two main attitudes: the first is being aware of the causes of plagiarism; the

second is the reassurance that plagiarism is made unlikely thanks to software used on

the platform where students submit their written assignments. Another argument for

take-home exams, according to Prof.2, is that the type of work required makes it

difficult to resort to plagiarism. It seems that professors do not fear getting papers

written by people other than their students, which is a serious obstacle according to

French professors. This is perhaps because American professors at UTA, who on

average have only two classes to teach per semester (who meet twice a week), entertain

a closer relationship with their students who can also come and see them easily during

office hours and at other times. Trust is not a vain word. The students feel challenged

by the assignments and they want to do well. The way the curriculum is organized in

France is rather different: students have two to three times more classes to take and

they meet with their teachers only once a week with hardly any possibility to see them

outside class. Such conditions do not favour the same type of trust relationship as at

UTA.

Specification grading

50 Prof.3 was interviewed because of the specific type of grading system that she

implemented in her course. The online description reads: “This course uses a system of

assessment called specifications grading, an alternative to a points-based grading

system. Students choose the grade “tier” (A, A-, B+, B.) they plan to work towards at the

beginning of the semester, then earn the grade associated with that tier by completing

all tier requirements at a satisfactory level or above.” Prof.3 clarifies that this form of

“grading agreement” involves students individually choosing a tier and then the group

determines the specific criteria within the grading tier.

•

•

•

•

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Grading agreement

51 Such an approach implies a more detailed breakdown of the different requirements.

Prof.3 went on:

The students who are looking for an A have to complete 8 author thinking pieces;one-page single-space papers on different themes and novels and they meet insmall groups. Each group sets criteria for preparation. Some decide to bring threewritten responses, some decide to bring questions for discussion, passages, lots ofdifferent activities. They decide the criteria and the sub-readings schedule in eachgroup. Then, I check in with them individually and give them feedback to clarifythe expectations for what they produce each day. With other groups, I am askingthem questions. They complete the group evaluation at the end.

52 This system leaves room for the students’ own choice of tier and then a group decision

on criteria. Individually, they decide for which grade they are aiming (A or B, B+) and,

in groups, they decide on the work and the number of activities they will have to do to

achieve the desired grade. The process involves 4 weeks of “traditional teaching” and

then the groups are formed. Therefore, in the same class, one has students whose

objectives are to get an A or a B. How is the grade validated? According to Prof.3, to

earn the grade they are aiming for, the students have to complete the requirements at

a satisfactory level (it does not have to be perfect: “And instead of assigning letter

grades for individual assignments, I assign satisfactory or incomplete. […] And the way

that they earn a higher-grade tier is if they complete more of those assignments or

they complete some pieces or more complex assignments.”) Usually, the A students are

required to revise some of their work, and the B students are not. B students have

slightly looser attendance requirements, whereas attendance is very strict for A

students, as well as participation, preparation, etc. There is more flexibility for B

students. No student aims for a C, because, in Prof.3’s class, all major in English. Prof.3

also uses tokens. Students have four tokens that they can use for attendance or

exchange for an absence or a revision for a higher grade. Revision is compulsory for the

A group. For Prof.3, “the process is more important to me than the, like, kind of

finished product.”

Overall grading

Grading models

53 How do the teachers grade the students? Do they give them an A easily? Before we

examine the answers, I wish to recall the four models discussed by French scholar

Christian Puren (2014). The first is a rising model: at the beginning, everyone is credited

with zero and earns points moving upwards, depending on their performance; the

second type is the top-down model, very common in France, where everyone starts with

20 out of 20 and gradually loses points for each mistake; the horizontal model, more

typical in British or American systems, starts from an average grade, like a C, and

allows upwards or downwards movements along the line; and finally, the transversal

model applies to grading pedagogical projects when both the outcome and the learning

process must be taken into consideration.

54 It seems that all six interviewees adopted the most common model in the USA: the

horizontal one.

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55 Prof.1 considered C to be the average. At the beginning of the semester, every student

is credited with a C and all the work and assignments contribute to rising above C and

earning a B or an A (rather exceptional for Prof.1).

56 Prof.6 had a similar approach. C is the average: Final grades include “plus” or “minus”

grades. Final class scores may be rounded up or down, according to students’ class

participation and performance on minor and ungraded assignments. A C grade will

indicate work that meets all the basic course requirements; As and Bs are honors

grades, designating work of some distinction. Grades are based only on work assigned

to everyone in the class; no extra credit work can be accepted.

57 Prof.3 stood as an exception for that matter, as seen above, since the students decided

what grade they were aiming for, as well as determining the criteria to earn that grade,

provided that they performed the activities at a satisfactory level. Although Prof.3

stood apart, her assessment policy belongs to the same type: the horizontal model with

a flexible average.

58 As for Prof.2 (creative writing), he acknowledged giving an A to his students if they did

the work properly and their writings were satisfactory. It seems that his starting grade

was not a C but a B, allowing the students to walk out with an A if the critiques they had

been writing were satisfactory. He also relied on their capacity of revising and

improving their work: “I will tell them, you know, right now, you know, you’ve got a

high B or you’re in a good spot to get an A and, you know, it’ll depend on the revision,

you know, um, I’ll try to give them as much as I can.”

59 He even experimented giving no grades for one semester but confessed it did not work:

“And there are some professors though, the visiting ones who don’t have, you know,

are just sort of passing through, who will not assign grades until the very end. And I

think I tried that in one semester and it just drove everyone crazy.”

60 Different grading systems are compared in Table 2.

Equivalences between grading systems

Table 2: Table of equivalence between grading systems

US GPA

(grade-point average)US letter grade US percentage grade French scale

4 A+ 97-100 18-20

4 A 93-96 17-17.9

3.7 A- 90-92 15-16.9

3.3 B+ 87-89 13-14.9

3 B 83-86 11-12.9

2.7 B- 80-82 10.5-10.9

2.3 C+ 77-79 10.1-10.4

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2 C 73-76 10

1.7 C- 70-72 9-9.9

1 D 65-69 8-8.9

0 E/F Below 65 0-7.9

Source: Adapted from OECD and GPA Tables of conversion.

61 At the high school level, only F counts as a Fail. But, in higher education, a D is not a

passing grade and cannot be transferred. At UTA, any grade below a C counted as a Fail.

62 If we consider the table above, the French and the American system share a similar

vision of success and failure, even though the former tends to use the top-down model.

63 The last question which needed to be addressed concerned the pressure that teachers

might feel when grading the students, due to several factors, such as the 2015 law issue

on firearms.

The 2015 law issue

64 My final question did not directly address the gun issue. This is how I formulated my

question to Prof.3, for instance:

So, I think I may have one more question, which is a little silly, but one of mycolleagues told me here, you know, nowadays they all get an A grade because, infact, humanities are different and if they were doing medical studies or sciences,they would get a C or a B, but because we are dealing with the humanities, we tendto give them As all the time for fear they would go elsewhere, you know, we needstudents in the humanities. And they say that when they were themselves students,it wasn’t the same at all. But today there is this tendency to give higher grades tostudents in humanities. What do you think of this? To what extent do you agree?

65 Prof.3 began replying thus:

Um maybe a little bit, but I think it’s kind of a pessimistic…, I think it’s a morenegative take on them than I would, I think, I guess, let me think about that. One ofthe things that I like about the grade tier system that I use with the, like the kind ofdifferent requirements is that they do a lot of work and, and because I’m interestedin the process rather than, like kind of, the finished thing, right? It’s like if they doall of these steps, if I do my job in terms of differentiating the teaching andproviding feedback and allowing them to do these revisions and stuff, they’re goingto learn. And I think that they do learn— Yeah, they have, they have worked for it and they’ve earned it. And so, and what Ilike about that system is I think that it’s kind of, um, maybe it ends up with a lot ofAs at the end.

66 According to Prof.3, her teaching and assessment methods certainly favour higher

grades (B+ or A), but this does not mean they are not deserved. In fact, the whole

process requires a lot of work and learning on behalf of the students. Is that not the

goal of higher education? Prof.3 adopted a method of assessing her students that

circumvents the obstacle: if you want to avoid pressure, just have your students work

in such a way that they can only get satisfactory grades. Her position is in line with

construct validity and the notion of fair assessment.

67 Prof.1 was inclined to disagree with the statement contained in my question above:

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Most of my colleagues do not [give As to anyone]. As are typically earned, not given.Err…, but I will concede that I think because of pressure by students, who tend toreinforce this notion that the humanities are subjective, easier and, err, lessobjective in terms of exams and tests, that they are easier courses, I think that is amisconception that sometimes is reinforced by faculty who then give those gradesexpecting students to do that. But I would disagree. I think for the most part mycolleagues, at least that I know, don’t just hand As out. I would not say that.

68 Prof.3 mentioned pressure from the students but not the kind of pressure that is

related to being allowed to carry concealed guns on campus. Her main point was that

professors should resist the pressure and remain as fair and as objective as possible

(fairness).

69 Prof.2 was asked to position himself on the issue of humanities delivering higher grades

than other subjects. He totally disagreed with the idea. Interestingly, speaking as a

fiction writer, he considered the necessity of raising the level of his teaching:

It’s been two years now, maybe, since the most recent election and, and just theunrest that we see throughout the world and the way, uh, I think it is eventuallyaffecting the humanities. And, just how are we, how are we to live in this world? —[N]ow I feel this tremendous responsibility — that they need to walk outta here,having understood the world from a lot of different perspectives, some that theymay not agree with, some that will shock them, some that may affirm what theywere already feeling. It may reflect some of their own lives. I don’t, I don’t knowthat it’s, it’s changed the way I assess them and maybe it’s changed the way Iassessed the curriculum.

70 Prof.4 replied as follows to my question:

I do think that, well I don’t know I haven’t taken a science class in a long time so Ican’t really speak to how rigorous they are. I guess what I would say is that I don’treally like grades. And so, err, I don’t want to think about them any more than theyhave to. I like designing assessments that I think produce good artifacts of mystudents’ learning. But I don’t like haggling over what score that is and I… I find itdispleasurable and so I… if, if there’s a higher curve in my class I don’t think it’sbecause I want to seduce them into staying in the humanities.

71 In other words, much like Prof.3, Prof.4 explained that she would rather focus on the

quality of the learning process and her assessment devices being relevant to her

teaching (construct validity).

72 In a semi-directed interview, the interviewer (INT) is allowed to ask other questions to

enrich the exchange. So, I continued with my train of thought, eliciting the following

exchange with Prof.4:

INT: But in general, I mean, did you notice such a tendency, you know, because you’ve been

teaching for seven years so you can maybe see that there is a tendency to give higher

grades nowadays compared to seven years back or — maybe not.

Prof.4: Maybe. I mean, I think, err… maybe yeah, maybe. I mean I just think there are

other factors too. Like, we have we have campus carry on UT campus which makes

myself and a lot of my colleagues sort of afraid of haggling over grades.

INT: What did you say?

Prof.4: Our students are allowed to have firearms in class.

INT: Oh yes, yes.

Prof.4: And that that I do think does introduce a level of…

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INT: Tension.

Prof.4: … Unease and tension. And so, I do think that there’s more than the

humanities that are being under threat… err… I think that I’ve heard multiple

colleagues talking about it not being worth arguing over grades because you hear

about professors getting shot over it.”

73 Then, I asked Prof.4 if she had noticed any of her students carrying a gun. Prof.4

reported a recent incident: a good friend of hers just had a student have a seizure in

class and when he fell, everyone could see he was carrying a gun. The other students

became nervous about it and the incident ruined the class dynamic.

74 As a matter of fact, one of my own students witnessed the incident and missed classes

for almost two weeks. His final results were affected in the end.

75 Prof.4 brought up the subject of the gun issue on her own and associated it with “other

factors” leading to more careful grading. She did not mention the money factor at all,

contrary to Prof.5.

76 Prof.5 compared his experience at UTA with his former position at Cornell University:

I did my graduate study at Cornell University and the students I taught there,actually, it was just sort of just a different student body in their own right. Likeincredibly wealthy students for the most part. And there, I did feel like there was akind of sense of entitlement that they felt like they had paid a certain amount ofmoney and they were entitled to the to an A grade that they expected. The studentshere I don’t think so.

77 Here, he noted the fees issue but considered that UTA was not concerned with the kind

of pressure linked with wealth and money.

78 Still, during my stay at UTA, a major college admissions scandal broke out nationally

involving athletic coaches all over the country who were accused of “accepting millions

of dollars to help admit undeserving students” (Medina 2019). Famous film or television

stars, fashion designers, and other wealthy parents were involved in this general fraud

in which SAT or ACT scores were falsified. One UTA professor was fired and tried.

79 Prof.5 continued:

I think the state legislature and a lot of the administrative apparatus around theuniversity create that sense of, like, the students are customers and I think thatattitude is definitely in the air but I don’t think that’s coming from, in myexperience at least, from the students at all. That’s not how they think of it. A lot ofthem are… err … I have lots of first-generation college students who are reallygrateful to be here.I think they are less, in a refreshing way, less focused on their grades than at otherinstitutions I’ve taught at. They seem more sincerely interested in learning.

80 Prof.5 referred to a sociological factor to support his point. He did not mention the gun

issue, contrary to Prof 4, and also Prof.6 for whom it is a factor not to be

underestimated.

81 According to Prof.6, the gun issue is a major issue, but she personally did not feel

threatened. She considered that the students in the humanities shared the same

attitude towards guns as teachers (who stick pictures of a kitten on the door of their

office with the caption: “This is my gun policy” or “no guns allowed in my office”):

The gun thing isn’t exaggerated, unfortunately. I mean, I don’t feel it, the threat.Because I, you know, since I’m in the humanities, we run into students who havemore our perspective than maybe other students in other fields would have. You

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know, they’re kind of drawn to the humanities because of that. Yeah, I do think thatthere has been pressure to raise grades.

82 Although she does not personally feel in danger, perhaps a sign that the widespread

presence of guns in Texas blunts the perceived threat of gun violence over time, she

admitted that the gun issue represents a factor for raising grades, among others, like a

change in her own views on assessment.

83 In what follows, she explained how she started as a “tough” grader, or “grade deflator”

according to the statistics produced by the main office; being in linguistics could

explain the low grades, however, since, as she puts it, “it was kind of easy because I

taught with linguistic-type content, and so, there are a lot of the, the exams were

objective and so some students just couldn’t do the material you know. It was like math

to them.” Her assessment policy changed to better take the students into account

(feasibility and fairness):

Now, I have a very different philosophy, so, and especially a different philosophyfor classes like this one. This one is, my view of it is, its aim is, to make peopleunderstand about non-mainstream dialects before they go into a class and startmarking people up with a red pen. So, I now give take-home exams. So, themidterm and the final [exams] are take home and I started thinking that myphilosophy was wrong. I used to give really hard in-class exams. And sometimespeople would even be in the hallway trying to finish [their exam] because I wouldget them out before the next class came in [to the classroom]. But I would let themfinish. But I felt like in a way what I was doing was trying to catch them unpreparedand what my real goal should be is to just get them somehow to absorb the materialand really learn the material. So, I give, in a way, the same kind of exam, but I letthem take it home. I let them work on it for a whole week. And what I say to them is“I’m, you know, I’ll give as many As people earn or as many Bs as people earn.” But Idon’t have sympathy for people who haven’t really read the material when they’reanswering these essay questions.

84 Among the other factors she mentioned which she believes contribute to raising grades

is the awards policy:

And once you know, they always tell people that evaluations are not positiveevaluations, are not correlated with high grades but it’s sort of patently obvious toanyone who looks around at what teachers get, teaching awards and so on. That isnot that and I’m not saying they’re not good teachers, I mean I’ve got no teachingaward myself, but you know it’s, it’s probably not the hardest, toughest grader.Like, I have a colleague who’s just very well known as being really tough, a reallyhard grader and, and you know, typically when she comes up for evaluation peopleare always worrying about her student evaluations. So yeah, I mean it’s definitely,it’s definitely there and people do talk about it explicitly.

85 In other words, colleagues and the whole institution tend to prefer “gentle grading”.

86 Prof.6 also mentioned the money issue: “I sort of feel there have always been students

who feel that way you know I’m paying for this, I’m signing up for your class and you

know I’d say it’s a contract you work for me, you know?”

87 And she saw a difference with foreign students:

Most students don’t behave that way but there are always a few that seem tobehave that way and I really notice a difference when I work with foreign students.So, the graduate courses that I’ve taught in my career have a higher attraction ratethan I think most courses do for foreign students. So, you know I’ve had studentsfrom the French department or German, Italian, you know et cetera, otherdepartments and they have a much different way of behaving in front of professorsI feel like.

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88 Prof.6 was the only one to mention that student expectations could also vary according

to whether they were US nationals or foreign students, although she did not fully

clarify in what way these expectations differed with US students.

Discussion

89 Overall, two teachers out of six (Prof.4 and Prof.6) admitted that the 2015 law was an

issue, but only one (Prof.4) considered it a real threat.

90 The two professors who mentioned the firearms issue are female. The gender factor

cannot be excluded. Still, our limited corpus is not relevant for quantitative analysis.

Two teachers (Prof.5 and Prof.6) considered the money factor as an issue, but only one

of them blamed the fact on the students (Prof.5).

91 Four of them (Prof.1, Prof.2, Prof.3, Prof.4) tend to free themselves from such pressure

and do not feel forced to raise the grades because they have adopted a way of teaching

and assessing in which the students work and learn enough to actually deserve higher

grades.

92 Interestingly, these two factors were raised by the same professor, Prof.6, who happens

to have had the longest career (35 years). She was perhaps more able to stand back

from the present time and take a long-range view of the situation.

93 In the final section of this article, I will present my own experience regarding

assessments at UTA and discuss the possibility of adapting some of the features to my

French university.

A brief analysis of my own experience

E329R course on English Romanticism

94 I had two classes which met for two hours twice a week. The first one, E371K, was on

English contemporary poetry with a group of 10 students (1 male and 9 female). The

other class, E329R, on English romanticism, gathered 26 students, including 16

majoring in English and the others in other subjects including history, biology,

business, accounting, health and society, philosophy, theatre, music, radio & TV, and

government. I will focus my attention on the latter course because the number of

students is more significant.

95 Although E329R was an upper-division course, it was open to lower-division students

(freshmen and sophomores), specialists, and non-specialists.

96 I developed the course building on the task-based approach (Nunan 1989; Widdowson

2002; Ellis 2003) and the concept of collaborative learning (Baudrit 2007), notions that

require clarification.

97 There are many definitions of a task (Breen 1989; Long 1985; Richards, Platt & Weber

1985; Crookes 1986; Prabhu 1987; Nunan 1989; Skehan; 1996; Lee 2000; Bygate, Skehan &

Swain 2001; Widdowson 2002; Ellis 2003; Dörnyei 2009). I chose to refer to Skehan’s

definition which is simple and corresponds to our purpose here: A task is “an activity in

which: meaning is primary; there is some sort of relationship to the real world; task

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completion has some priority; and the assessment of task performance is in terms of

outcome” (Skehan 1996, qtd by Ellis 2003: 4).

98 The general framework to design a task, as suggested by Rod Ellis, is also appropriate

here:

Input, i.e. the nature of the input provided in the task;

Conditions, i.e. the way in which the information is presented to the learners and the way in

which it is to be used;

Processes, i.e. the nature of the cognitive operations and the discourse the task requires;

Outcomes. i.e. the nature of the product that results from performing the task (Ellis 2003:

217).

99 As for collaborative or cooperative learning, it generally involves group work on a

common project. Still, the two modes present some differences. Cooperative learning

was developed by prominent figures from American social psychology, among whom

John Dewey in the 1920s; collaborative learning relies on the constructivist (Piaget

1976, 1977) and socio-constructivist paradigms (Vygotsky 1985 ([1934]). According to

Baudrit (2007), cooperation is often opposed to competition and tends to minimize

conflicts between the members of a group. Conversely, collaboration induces the co-

construction of knowledge and is liable to generate socio-cognitive conflict.

Cooperation usually refers to contributing to the achievement of the same task by the

group. A collaborative project may involve a macro-task divided between students or

small groups of students, each one performing a consistent part of the overall

assignment. In the field of foreign language didactics, collaboration is generally

considered more challenging, with complex tasks to perform, such as “opinion-gap

activities” (Prabhu 1987, qtd by Ellis 2003: 213), or “creative projects” (Willis 1996, qtd

by Ellis 2003: 212) that require the participants to integrate their partners’ ideas and

contributions. Our project was mostly of a collaborative type.

100 The overall goal was to build an online collaborative anthology made of all the

students’ papers. Each student had to prepare three papers:

the first was a preface to the romantic period,

the second a presentation of a poet and a poem with artistic illustrations, and

the third a criticism of the full anthology and three samples of their choice which relied on

individual oral presentations and open access to the online anthology.

101 Grading involved some criteria inspired by the online, generic description of all courses

and was agreed upon in advance by the students:

1 short paper (20%);

1 short research paper (20%);

1 final exam (given on the last class day) (30%);

Class participation and preparation (30%).

102 Also added to this description was a short paragraph:

The reading for the class happens outside class. But all the work of the classhappens in class. Group work will also be used. Therefore, class attendance ismandatory. To receive a grade of C or higher, you may not have more than twounexcused absences.

103 In fact, the whole approach required the students’ presence, and they played along.

•

•

•

•

1.

2.

3.

•

•

•

•

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The Outcome

An Anthology of English romanticism

104 The final product was a 188-page anthology composed as follows:

The 7-page preface was based on our readings and made from excerpts of all the students’

first papers put together (short paper, 20%).

The 132-page first part consisted of the collection of all second papers (1 short research

paper, 20%).

The 30-page second part contained all their third papers (1 final exam, 30%): a collaborative

general review followed by each students’ critiques of a selection of three presentations (in

part 1).

The anthology ended with the list of “editors” in which each student collaborated in

drafting a short self-presentation (3 pages).

105 Table 3 presents the overview of the project.

Table 3: The project’s design features according to Ellis’s model

Design Features

(Ellis 2003: 217)Paper 1 Paper 2 Paper 3

Input

The nature of the input

provided in the task

The course on

romanticism

The Longman Anthology of

British Literature – The

Romantics and their

Contemporaries

The course on

romanticism

The Longman Anthology of

British Literature – The

Romantics and their

Contemporaries

2 films:

Bright Star (Jane

Campion, 2009)

Mary Shelley (Haïfa

Al Mansour, 2018)

Original manuscripts

from the Harry Ransom

Centre

The anthology

minus the review

and critiques

Conditions

The way in which the

information is presented

to the learners and the

way in which it is to be

used

Class and home

readings;

academic writing

Class and home

readings;

documentary research,

both academic and

artistic;

academic writing

Oral presentations

and personal

readings

critique writing

•

•

•

•

•

•

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Processes

The nature of the

cognitive operations and

the discourse the task

requires

Synthetical skills:

summarizing

Analytical skills +

emotional and artistic

intelligence:

Presentation of a poet

and a poem with three

illustrations

Evaluating:

appreciating

Outcomes

The nature of the product

that results from

performing the task.

PrefaceContributions to a

literary anthology

Reviews and

critiques

106 For papers 1 and 2, the input was provided by the course on romanticism based on the

Longman Anthology of British Literature – The Romantics and their Contemporaries (5 th

Edition); for paper 2, two films were added: Bright star by Jane Campion (2009), and Mary

Shelley by Haïfaa Al Mansour (2018), as well as original manuscripts, after our visit to

the Harry Ransom Centre. But for paper 3, the input was the collaborative anthology

itself (papers 1 and 2 had already been collected), minus the outcome of paper 3, i.e. the

general reviews and the critiques.

107 With regard to the conditions, one may notice an evolution from the first to the third

paper, especially in the degree of autonomy required from the students.

108 As for the processes, they involved summarizing, expressing oneself both academically

and emotionally or artistically, and evaluating.

109 Finally, in line with Skehan’s definition of a task (see supra), the outcomes were termed

“in some sort of relationship to the real world”: “a preface”, “contributions to a literary

anthology”, and “reviews and critiques”, which is typical of a task-based approach as

opposed to a purely pedagogical one.

Assessments

110 Regarding assessments, I adopted the transversal model more appropriate for

collaborative projects. I was also curious enough to try the American approach and

included two features in the initial schedule: peer review and a revision policy, as well

as an adaptation of take-home exams.

Peer-review

111 Before uploading their paper, the students had the opportunity, in the previous class,

for about an hour, to bring their work in progress and discuss it with their peers. I

would supervise the session and make sure each student was happy with the feedback

they received and that all would be able to improve their paper. Being free to choose

their partners and interact privately minimized “face-saving” issues (Goffman 1955;

Brown & Levinson 1987) that may arise in peer assessment practices.

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Revision policy

112 Once graded, the students who did not receive an A were given the opportunity to

modify their production following the teacher’s feedback. Simply correcting mistakes

was not enough; a substantive improvement of the paper was expected.

Take-home exams

113 I thought take-home exams would fit the purpose of the third paper, but I adapted it to

a mix: the students would finish their critiques in class but work on them at home. The

last two sessions before the final exam consisted of oral presentations of the first part

of the anthology (the students’ second papers). In parallel, the content with the

illustrations (videos, songs, pictures, other poems, etc.) was made available online

(Figure 9). Consequently, the students had to actively participate in the last sessions

and read the anthology before they could produce an overall assessment (see Appendix

1) and select the three contributions they wanted to review for the final paper.

Figure 9: Illustrations from student contributions

Source: UTA students, Spring 2019.

114 As for the assessment model, as mentioned earlier, I chose the transversal one which

allows the teacher to grade on two dimensions: literary and pragmatic. The literary

dimension concerns the quality of writing and the ability to develop a personal

reflection on poetry; the pragmatic dimension was the ability to comply with the task

and cooperate with others in order to reach the final goal. This second criterium was

linked to attendance and class participation (30%).

115 In the end, all but two of the students earned an A (which corresponds to a GPA score of

4). One student obtained a B+ because he missed some classes and handed in papers

that did not meet all the requirements (eg. his second paper contained only one

illustration instead of three).

116 Another student received a D+ (the grade recommended to me by the Head of the

department instead of an F (Fail), because she dropped out of university altogether and

never handed in the third paper, despite my messages urging her to do so.

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117 I do not really know what would have been the average grade if I had not chosen the

task-based approach (the collaborative anthology as the final task, which really

appealed to the students as shown in Appendix 2), nor the peculiar assessment features

described above.

118 It is difficult to compare with more general figures. The average GPA score for the 515

students majoring in English at UTA in 2019 was 3.28, which is almost a B+ (3.3). As for

the graduate students, the department has about 100 of them, and grades less than an A

are very rare.

119 To what extent is a 4.0 GPA obtained in E329R due to the teaching approach, the

assessment method, the lack of experience of a French professor grading American

students, or simply the skill and competency of the students enrolled?

Conclusion

120 Our research questions read: What are the main features of assessments in the English

department at the University of Texas at Austin? Are there any factors (such as money,

the presence of firearms, or grade expectations for courses in the Humanities) that put

pressure on professors and force them to raise grades to avoid confrontational

situations?

121 Regarding the first issue, this paper described the main traits and suggests that some

could be borrowed profitably in France, including:

A peer review and revision policy;

Take-home exams;

Specifications grading (tiers).

122 Still, how can we adapt them to the humanities in the French context? I believe peer

review and revision policies are easy to implement if attendance and class participation

are part and parcel of the final grade. They are of interest because they require

collaboration between students and foster mutual trust, as well as a spirit of solidarity.

123 Revision policy is also relevant in the French context with the same conditions. Indeed,

those two features are based on reciprocity. In other words: “if you attend my class and

participate in all the activities, you will benefit from the support of your peers and the

feedback from your teacher so that you can get better grades”. This is part of what in

France is called “a learning agreement” (“contrat pédagogique”).

124 As for take-home exams, I suppose teachers are likely to be less suspicious of

malpractice from students with whom they meet twice a week and can more easily

establish a high-quality relationship. The possibility of a mix between a take-home

exam and a class exam could be a solution, especially if the approach enhances a

personal reflection on a topic relevant to the class, as in the E329R final exam.

125 Specifications grading seems to be an attractive approach, especially for France where

the Baccalauréat is both a secondary school leaving examination and a post-secondary

school diploma giving automatic access to higher education, a general principle marred

by the sky-high drop-out rate for first-year students who are often ill prepared to study

in French public universities which have limited means to welcome and nurture

incoming students. A specifications grading would enable students to design a flexible

•

•

•

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work pattern, depending on their abilities and goals, and without fear of negative

judgement. This would take them even further along the path of a learning agreement.

126 It could be implemented at universities in France (some have already adopted the

system) since it keeps with the philosophy of the new nationally-mandated “plan

licence” which aims for each age group to reach a 50% success rate for undergraduate

degrees, as it enables students to take more time to graduate without “failing” their

exams and eventually dropping out of university without a degree.

127 As for the second issue concerning the pressure that can be felt within the humanities

regarding grading, even if the majority of the professors interviewed at UTA denied

such a problem existed, at least some of them noticed tensions related to: student fees

(if they are too high, it may become a real problem); the 2015 law allowing students to

carry concealed guns on campus; the deterioration of the overall situation in the

country and the world. These tensions do not carry over to France where tuition costs

have remained largely the same over the past two decades, unlike in the UK, where

students can now be charged upwards of £9,000 per year, producing a client mentality

among some of them. In French public universities, students cannot pretend to be

customers (unlike in some “Grandes Écoles” or private business schools). With respect

to guns, in France, guns are prohibited and the police are usually not allowed on

campus. But to return to the provocative title of this paper, I must concede that all but

one of the professors I interviewed did not really feel threatened by “concealed carry”

and that their freedom of action in grading the work of their students remains

generally unimpaired. More surprisingly, perhaps, is that their relative indifference

precludes the possibility of any open discussion about who, in class, is ‘hiding’ a gun

which could perpetrate a massacre against his/her fellow classmates.

128 An abiding difference with the grading system in both countries is that, in France, we

can still give low, even humiliating grades with impunity. Fair enough. But why not

experiment with a New Deal with the students based on trust, participation, and real

training, leading to a more valid, reliable, and fair assessment?

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APPENDIXES

Appendix 1

Excerpts from the preface (paper 1)

The poet’s role and the art of poetry

[…]

Leigh Hunt, who published many works of the most famous Romantic poets, wrote in

The Liberal “[Shelley was] one of the noblest of human beings... who had more religion

in his very differences in religion than thousands of your church-and-state men...” He

wrote these brave words in response to The Monthly Paris Review which -as many other

literary articles and journals dubbed Shelley as “...black, poisonous, and bitter calumny

than [Shelley’s] had the misfortune to entertain from his very earliest youth opinions,

both in religion and politics, diametrically opposed to established systems and

conceiving the happiness of mankind unattainable...” (Rohan)

It certainly took a great deal of courage to be a romantic poet at that time. And their

subversive role in society shouldn’t be underestimated.

During this time period, there was an influx of poetic creation of characteristics, for

example, poetic autobiography, visionary epics, fusing of several myths, stand up

pattern and tale of adventure, individualism and individual experience within romance

writing or self-discovery. There was a return to genuine observation and feeling (…)

that brought about a humane aspect of poetry. (Kristin)

The Romantic period was dominated by male poets such as William Wordsworth,

William Blake, Percy Shelley, John Keats, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. However, it was

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punctuated with the rise of a few female writers like Mary Wollstonecraft, her daughter

Mary Shelley, and Dorothy Wordsworth. These women were a part of the group of men,

related to them in one way or another. More generally, most renowned writers to come

out of this period were connected in one way or another, whether through

collaboration, relation, or friendship. (Gabriella)

A lasting influence

To conclude, one may say that an emphasis on the importance and beauty of nature is

captured by the Romantic interest in the sublime. The sublime presents nature as

overwhelming, as incomprehensible large, beautiful and terrifying. Viewing nature in

this way makes it more spiritual and divine. It places man in the context of nature, in

harmony with himself and the world, rather than in the context of Enlightenment

rationality, viewing nature as mute and something to be conquered. Furthermore,

Romanticism affirmed the power, beauty, and validity of the life of man. Rather than

viewing man as a beast or a “worm of sixty winters”, the Romantics viewed man as a

vessel to transcend typical reality and engage with the divine. The effects of

Romanticism were widespread and influential on the intellectual climate that we find

ourselves in today. The effects of the Romantic movement were deeply felt by the

American Transcendentalists who established a large part of the intellectual narrative

in America. Personally, I feel much more of a connection with a romantic view of life

than that of typical rationalist thinking, as it seems to add depth and richness. (John)

Appendix 2

Excerpts from the general reviews (paper 3)

“The anthology of British Romantic Poetry plants a seed of interest in its readers that

continues to grow beyond the pages here.” (Lindsey)

“All of these different styles and perspectives have come together to form something

truly meaningful that everyone should be proud of. It’s not often that most college

students get to participate in something so creatively engaging. This anthology, in my

opinion, is a welcomed change of pace and wonderfully refreshing, because oftentimes

writing for English classes can become a very suffocating experience. The creative

freedom offered by the assignments felt like a challenge at times because such

autonomy is rare in the American classroom.” (Daniel G.)

“Engineers, computer scientists, and liberal arts majors were united, if only for a

semester by this anthology.” (Daniel G.)

“Because the Romantic era is filled with dreamers like Wordsworth, tormented souls

like Coleridge, stubborn writers like Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter, and true

hopeless romantics such as Keats, it causes Romantic literature to be multifaceted and

elicit feelings in readers that transcend time.” (Veronica)

“This class worked very hard on this anthology, and their work and love for these poets

really shines [sic] through.” (Emma R.)

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“They, above all, show that romanticism is still teaching students of today about free

imagination and feeling. It is because of reviews like this that the reader of this paper

should go and read more of what these students have to say.” (Daniel V.)

For permission to access the full online anthology, please contact the author.

NOTES

1. Such personal considerations may sound inappropriate in a research paper. However, they are

meant to clarify the position of the author who was given the rare opportunity to conduct an

experiment on didactics and poetry in a completely new environment, relieved of the usual

workload of a French enseignant-chercheur (a tenured academic who is expected to split his/her

time teaching and doing research).

ABSTRACTS

This paper focuses on the issue of assessments, i.e. requirements and grading, in an American

university. It addresses the following questions: What are the main features of assessments in the

English department at the University of Texas at Austin (UTA)? Are there any factors that put

pressure on professors and force them to raise grades? Methodologically, we first analyzed the

online descriptions of all the English courses offered during the 2019 Spring semester. This

quantitative analysis highlights the main features of assessments in the context of this university

and makes it possible to confront them with the issues of reliability and fairness (McMillan 1999).

Then, we conducted a qualitative analysis of six interviews of professors who explained how they

evaluate and grade their students. This second type of data analysis allows us to discuss the issue

of validity (Cronbach & Meehl 1955; McMillan 1999), as well as that of fair grading. To what

extent do the interviewees feel forced to raise grades and why? Is the firearm issue in Texas a

relevant factor? Finally, a case study focuses on an upper-division course of English Romantic

Poetry given by the present researcher to a class of 26 undergraduate students (of all levels:

freshmen and seniors) majoring in English or other subjects, which investigates the possibility of

formatting a valid course that generates higher grades.

Cet article traite de l’évaluation, en termes d’exigences et de notation dans une université

américaine. Il aborde les questions suivantes : Quelles sont les principales caractéristiques des

évaluations dans le département d’anglais de l’Université du Texas à Austin (UTA) ? Y a-t-il des

facteurs qui exercent une pression sur les professeurs et les forcent à augmenter leurs notes ? Du

point de vue méthodologique, nous avons d’abord analysé les descriptions en ligne de tous les

cours d’anglais proposés au cours du 2ème semestre 2019. Cette analyse quantitative met en

évidence les principales caractéristiques des évaluations dans le cadre de cette université et

permet de les confronter aux enjeux de fiabilité et d’équité (McMillan 1999). Ensuite, nous avons

mené une analyse qualitative de six entretiens avec des professeurs qui ont explicité leur

manière d’évaluer et de noter leurs étudiants. Ce deuxième type d’analyse des données permet de

s’interroger sur la question de la validité (Cronbach et Meehl 1955 ; McMillan 1999), et de la

notation équitable. Dans quelle mesure les personnes interrogées se sentent-elles obligées

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d’augmenter les notes et, si oui, pour quelles raisons ? La loi sur les armes à feu au Texas est-elle

un facteur pertinent ? Enfin, une étude de cas se concentre sur un cours de poésie romantique

anglaise donné par l’auteure à une classe de 26 étudiants de la première à la quatrième année de

licence, spécialistes ou non spécialistes, qui étudie la possibilité de formater un cours valable qui

génère des notes plus élevées.

INDEX

Keywords: assessment, American higher education, requirements, grading, humanities,

firearms, education, university

Mots-clés: évaluation, enseignement supérieur américain, exigences, notation, humanités, port

d’arme, éducation, université

AUTHOR

CLAIRE TARDIEU

Claire Tardieu is full professor of English Didactics in the Department of English, Sorbonne

Nouvelle University. Over the course of her career, she held various positions in Société des

Anglicistes de l’Enseignement Supérieur (SAES) and Association pour la Recherche en Didactique de

l’Anglais et en Acquisition (ARDAA). Her main fields of interest concern Foreign language

assessment, tandem language and culture learning, didactic terminology and epistemology, and

teacher training. She lectures to undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as novice

teachers. As a collaborator of the DEPP (Direction de l’Évaluation, de la Performance et de la

Prospective) at the Ministry of Education, she took part in several European projects and is

currently a French expert for Pisa Foreign Language Assessment scheduled for 2025 by the OECD.

Contact: claire.tardieu [at] sorbonne-nouvelle.fr

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