Reaction, Progression and Vaccination, or: What can Squid Game tell us about pandemics?
Reaction, Progression and Vaccination, or: What can Squid Game tell us about pandemics?

Summary/Abstract: This paper analyses the so-called “reactionary” and “progressive” attitudes towards vaccination during the COVID-19 pandemic and poses the question as to how a hitherto apolitical phenomenon, such as vaccination could be articulated as a manifestation and field of performance for polarized worldviews. It claims an uncertainty of belonging in the middle-class and approaches both attitudes as a symptom of that. The development of the logic of capital in circulation of commodity exchange from equivalization to indifferentiation is stated as to what allows this uncertainty to render apolitical phenomena as a field of clashing worldviews. Indifference of commodities leads to the extra-economic gaining primacy over the economical and heating up the competition of self-distinguishment. Both attitudes are revealed then as varying means to win the competition, vis-à-vis the fact that none of them counts more than the other.

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