ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 on ‘Un/Known: Confronting COVID-19 in Highly Uncertain Times’ focuses on the enigmatic core of the unprecedented pandemic. It argues that the pandemic’s relations with us lie in a paradox: it is impossible to live with it as much as it is impossible to live without it. It describes the pandemic as a ‘curious case’, with ingrained novelty and intricacy, and a fair share of secrecy, mysteries, concealments and silence zones. In this backdrop the known-unknown dialectics is identified as the constitutive core of the pandemic dynamics and of numerous forces negotiating and/or countering it. In the process the chapter puts forth the provocative argument that the ‘unknown’ is bound to have an indelible mark in understanding and analysing the pandemic. The discussion then moves to the interpretation of the pandemic as a flexi-modern development, with the social theory of late modernity set in the background. In the analysis communication is accorded a significant status, not as an end in itself but as an essential mediating force for sustaining the dominant form of (pandemic) governance and the counter-search for alternative modes.
