Review of Mark Honigsbaum (2020) The Pandemic Century A History of Global Contagion from the Spanish Flu to Covid 19
A dominant narrative of the 2020 Covid 19 pandemic has been that governments and institutions have been 'guided by the science' when making decisions to lockdown countries and regions and then subsequently lift restrictions and return to 'business' as usual. The singular 'science' has been used rhetorically to justify such decisions. Mark Honigsbaum's The Pandemic Century A History of Global Contagion from the Spanish Flu to Covid 19 (2020) is written as an archaeology of pandemic knowledge from the past 100 years. Honigsbaum's detailed exploration shows that there is anything but one, stable, quantified truth to be found during a pandemic aka 'the science' The archaeological 'dig' of ten pandemics from the last century, unearthing the complex interplay between the natural and the social, could quite conceivably reference Foucault and The Archaeology of Knowledge (Foucault 2002) as a methodological framework. Another of Foucault's works, The Order of Things (Foucault 2007) is also relevant with its focus on biology, economics and linguistics (life, labour and language) In detailing such complexities which involve myriad disruptions of ecological equilibriums with new ways of living and technologies, the 'science' then becomes a reified rhetoric (Lukacs 1990) Lukacs' theory of reification mechanically objectifies commodity structure in capitalism, described by Lukacs as a 'phantom objectivity' The ten cases detailed in The Pandemic Century (Honigsbaum 2020) show that in each pandemic, there is never one truth to be found but a complex interplay between in Postdigital Science and Education https:/doi.org/10.1007/s42438 020 00170 z
Postdigital Science and Education