Abstract
This paper offers a social phenomenological reading of the globally binding practice of ‘social distancing’ in light of the precautionary measures against the spreading of the COVID-19 virus. Amid speculation about the far-reaching effects of temporarily applicable measures and foresights about the advent of an ethos that has been heralded by the media as the ‘new normal’, the ubiquitous phenomenon of social distancing calls for a fundamental ontological elucidation. The purported hermeneutic that is situated in the broader place branding and experiential marketing literatures places COVID-19 in the shoes of Being, and, therefore, imagines how Being would behave ontologically if it were a virus. By positing that the virus does operate like Being, five these are formulated as experiential interpretive categories with regard to the ontological status of COVID-19. The adopted approach makes the following contributions to the extant literature: First, it addresses a wholly new phenomenon in place branding, namely a pre-branded place that is non-negotiable, globally applicable and seemingly equivalent to pure void. Second, it advances the application of phenomenological research in experiential consumption by highlighting the aptness of the so far peripheral (in the marketing discipline) strand of Heideggerian fundamental ontology. Third, it expands the notion of place in the place branding literature, by showing how spatialization is the outcome of temporalization, in line with the adopted phenomenological perspective.
Highlights
Heideggerian existential phenomenology surfaced at the turn of the 20th C. with the magnum opus Being & Time (2001), as a fundamental ontology with an indispensable social orientation, intent on subverting both philosophical metaphysics, as well as the cogitocentric approach of Husserlian phenomenology (that was bequeathed in different ways to offshoots/diversions that engage with a cogito-centric platform, including Merleau–Ponty’s corporeal turn (Malpas 2018), Sartre’s existentialism, Schutz and Luckmann’s (1974) social phenomenology)
In light of the above introductory remarks, this paper pursues the following argumentative pathway: An overview of key concepts of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology is offered as the conceptual scaffolding for the ensuing existential phenomenological analytic. This is followed by a discussion that is intent on situating fundamental ontology among the prevalent perspectives in contemporary place branding theory and in justifying its relative merits in understanding Covid-19′s spatialization strategy and the meaning of social distancing as lived experience
On a very different note, the main contributions of Heideggerian fundamental ontology amid the multivocal conceptualizations of space and place branding consist in the following: (i) space is dislodged from the subjectivism/ objectivism binarism which is premised on an object ontology (i) for the first time space is viewed dynamically as existential spatialization (ii) this process is intimately interwoven with temporalization, as the condition of spatialization (iii) space is explicitly relativized in terms of proximity by assigning primacy to a ‘thereness’ as the place where
Summary
Heideggerian existential phenomenology surfaced at the turn of the 20th C. with the magnum opus Being & Time (2001), as a fundamental ontology with an indispensable social orientation (aka a social ontology), intent on subverting both philosophical metaphysics, as well as the cogitocentric approach of Husserlian phenomenology (that was bequeathed in different ways to offshoots/diversions that engage with a cogito-centric platform, including Merleau–Ponty’s corporeal turn (Malpas 2018), Sartre’s existentialism, Schutz and Luckmann’s (1974) social phenomenology). Keywords Social distancing · Place branding · Experiential consumption · Covid-19 · Social phenomenology · Fundamental ontology · Rhetoric
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