Post-Covid: What is cultural theory useful for?

Abstract

This short piece explores what cultural theory should learn from the experience of the global pandemic. It argues that the main lesson should not be about how the crisis of the pandemic has been interpreted culturally, but about the deep social and economic inequalities which were foregrounded through the experience of ‘getting by’ in the pandemic, which positioned people in very different ways. So dramatic have been those inequalities, that any inherited notion of culture as something shared need to be definitively abandoned. This had already been anticipated in Ulf Hannerz’s deconstruction of holistic notions of culture three decades ago, but it needs now to be acted on, as we seek to confront honestly the growing inequalities which make the normal order of everyday life possible.