ABSTRACT
This article theorizes the connection between political distrust and conspiracy theories through a post-political framework. Following Luc Boltanski’s focus on the critical capacities of ordinary actors, it builds on interviews with participants of the Yellow Vest Movement in France who hold conspiratorial views of Covid-19 and the vaccine. The article explores how the interviewees’ critique mirrors that of post-political theorists. In particular, I use Rancière’s notion of subjectification and politics to theorize how conspiracy theories function as a means of dissent in the interviewees’ understanding of their experiences as well as in their own critique of and disillusionment with politics in France. As such, this article explores how political trust affected reactions to the pandemic, how political trust is interconnected with conspiracy theories and finally how such conspiracy theories can be viewed as biproducts of the post-political order. [ FROM AUTHOR]
ABSTRACT
The article presents an analysis of the news broadcast on Czech public television during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020. Based on the concept of post-politics, the analysis illustrates how Czech Television created consensus, naturalized the measures adopted by the government, and transformed a potentially political space into one that privileged instrumental and technical solutions. The author argues that the later emergence of protest movements in Czechia may also be related to the first wave of the pandemic being presented in a consensual, post-political form in public service media. This activity prevented society from recognizing the socially unequal impact of the pandemic and the measures aimed at reducing its impact. Dealing with the question of how to represent a world that went through a rapid change, because of a pandemic, the article ends with a plea for agonistic media pluralism.