Searching for the Elusive “Covidiot”: Moral Governance, Policing and the Social Production of Ignorance in a (Post-) Pandemic World

Abstract

This comment piece examines the social figure of the “covidiot”, which emerged at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic and has been used for social and political purposes since then. We argue that the covidiot is a somewhat elusive figure whose formation actualizes wider symbolic struggles over moral and epistemological issues that speak to contemporary social anxieties. Firstly, the paper suggests that the covidiot is typically imagined as a figure of blame through which certain individuals and groups are moralized for their failure to follow social distance regulations. The covidiot is thereby constructed as a threat to the moral social order and subjected to forms of policing and governance. In these processes, attributions of covidiocy and their contestations can be read as struggles for moral hegemony which serve to construct moral boundaries between deserving and undeserving citizens. Secondly, the paper offers a preliminary critique of the social production of ignorance, pointing out how the political uses of the covidiot obscure the societal processes that produce systemic ignorance, allocate blame in individuals while undervaluing the responsibility of corporations, media outlets or the nation-state. This figure is therefore implicated in struggles over epistemic authority characteristic of our present post-truth era.