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Title: The Crisis as Usual or Living on the Volcano of Civilization: The Post-Pandemic New Global
The Crisis as Usual or Living on the Volcano of Civilization: The Post-Pandemic New Global
Issue: 51/2023
Citation Svetlana Hristova. "The Crisis as Usual or Living on the Volcano of Civilization: The Post-
style: Pandemic New Global". Divinatio 51:105-130.
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CRISES AND CULTURES 105
Svetlana Hristova
THE CRISIS AS USUAL OR LIVING

ON THE VOLCANO OF CIVILIZATION:
THE POST-PANDEMIC NEW GLOBAL
Abstract: Globalization, spelled out as the triumph of neoliberalism and

global market economy in the 1980s, with its advent in 1990s entered the
phase of the great uncertainty (Robertson), gradually turning our life into con-
fluence of crises (Chomsky). Today’s post-pandemic new normal is analyzed
as a structural effect of the world risk society (Beck). It involves an emerging
safety-and-security-lead culture, dominated by the ethos of avoiding risks and
seeking for sustainability in all spheres of human life; growing medicaliza-
tion, enabled by further digitalization, techno-medical quantification and to-
talizing observation of all aspects of human existence, leading to new unions
between political power, medical expertise, and technology – safetycracy
(Agamben). Analyzing COVID-19 as a dress rehearsal of risk society, the pa-
per discusses three major effects of the pandemics as systematic consequences
of the process of globalization: the deglobalization, including mobility halt
and re-bordering of nation-states, on the one hand, hyper-digitization, on the
other, and development of safety-lead new global as a negation of the neolib-
eral format of globalization.
Keywords: risk society, deglobalization, medicalization, safetycracy, new
global
Introduction: Crisis, COVID-19 and Globalization

One of the most powerful concepts dominating public discourses in
our recent history – the ‘G word’ – globalization, full of economic promises
and developmental hopes at the beginning, consequently, was fused seam-
lessly with the notions of risk and crisis, thus shaping people’s perceptions

Svetlana Hristova
106 of fear and existential uncertainty. These concepts produced their own nar-
ratives and conceptual proliferation: ‘precariousness’ and ‘precariats’ were
born from the ‘crisis’; the antidote to ‘risk society’ were the concepts of
‘sustainability’ and ‘resilience’; the ‘globalization’ and its numerous facets
(‘financialization’, ‘McDonaldization’, ‘glocalization’ and ‘Americaniza-
tion’, among the others) during the recent lockdowns landed in its current
negation – ‘deglobalization’. Yet, another series of notions of medical ori-
gin was added to the growing sociolect of fear – COVID-19, SARS, lock-
down, infodemic, quarantine, self-isolation – all denoting the conditions of
emergency, caused by the sudden outbreak of a relentless disease that took
over the whole world in just three months of 2020, changing human life
overnight and questioning the core of our culture: how to continue to live
together. It seems, the virus has turned into a real ‘constitutive danger of our
co-living’ (Barry 2022: 6), implying a civilizational shift.
Actually, these processes can be traced back to the 1980s when dif-
ferent aspects of globalization – the transnational intensive flows of people,
money, information and goods which involved the construction of new sets
of technological apparatuses and means of orientation (Featherstone 1995,
2001, 2020) became discernible by naked eye and turned into an object of
intensive analyses. It was only a decade later when the stifling breath of so-
cial precariousness and ecological decline was already spreading throughout
the world (Hristova and Czepczinski 2017). Roland Robertson, well-known
DIVINATIO, volume 51, Spring-Summer 2023
as one of the first theorists of globalization, made a remarkable observation

au fin de siècle: ‘We have entered the phase of what appears to us in 1990
to be the great global uncertainty’ (Robertson, 2000: 50). But an identical
conclusion was drawn a half century earlier when one of the most outstand-
ing Spanish philosophers José Ortega y Gasset declared in a radio broadcast
in Munich in July 1951 that we live in a difficult and uneasy age, in times
of complete uncertainty when we do not feel anything solid under our feet
(Ortega 2019: 302).
Ultimately, the present world is almost cracking under the unceasing
waves of crises, recently determined by Noam Chomsky as confluence of
crises (Chomsky, 2021). The idea that we live in a constant crisis, and grad-
ually crisis became a norm of present human condition received growing
popularity. However, ‘crisis as usual’ is certainly an oxymoron. Crisis is
always an exclusion to the ordinary life; crisis like death – even if antici-
pated, when it comes – always takes us by surprise. Even though some au-
thors think that ‘the concept of crisis can generalize the modern experience
to such an extent that “crisis” becomes a permanent concept of “history”’

The Crisis as Usual or Living on the Volcano of Civilization...
(Koselleck, 2006: 371), crisis stricto sensu cannot be a permanent condi- 107
tion of living. Crisis in psychological sense of individual or group (cultural)
identity confusion is characterized by intensified, sometimes painful self-
reflection (Erikson, 1968). As the etymology of the Ancient Greek word
krisis reveals, this is actually one of its primary connotations of sorting out,
deciding, judging. It seems that unstable (implicitly transitional) life situa-
tion and intensified reflection go together as indispensable aspects of any
crisis. For Erik Erikson (1968) both, individual ego-crisis and cultural group
crisis, when successfully resolved, lead to new normality, understood as a
restored feeling of self-esteem and wellbeing, and this occurs always when
life conditions radically change. For this reason, Erikson considers that psy-
chological crisis is periodically occurring in all stages of human life as part
of normal personal development. But still, it is interpreted as a moment of
dramatic change, relatively restricted period of transition. Similarly, the no-
tion of crisis, in its medical sense, means such crucial point in the develop-
ment of a decease after which there is an exodus – either healing, or death.
During the last three decades we have been jumping from crisis to
crisis (financial, economic, social, political, institutional, ecological, medi-
cal, cultural, military, and humanitarian at the end) – all contributing to our
perception of permanent crisis that made us doubt whether the situation
is still manageable; isn’t it about structural deficiencies of capitalism itself
(Streeck, 2016). Today, we have carried down so deeply in the ocean of un-
certainty, that we palpably feel the threats and growing social unpredictabil-
ity that is changing both, our world and our mind. Such radical change was
described by José Ortega y Gasset as a ‘historical crisis’. In the book trans-
lated in English as ‘Man and Crisis’, published originally a century ago in
the interwar roaring twenties (1922), Ortega couples ‘crisis’ with ‘change’
by distinguishing two forms of historical change of life: when something
changes in our world or when our world is changing. The historical crisis
is when the world in which people live has changed radically (‘collapsed’),
and man does not know what to do because man does not know any more
what to think of the world: the crisis acquires catastrophic character (Ortega
y Gasset, 1993: 108). For Ortega, when crisis occurs, it is manifested in both
–in the being and in the thinking of people, and for this reason the change
begins as negative-critical, the traditional norms and ideas are rejected as
false; people have not discovered yet a new moral compass and suffer from
feeling of insecurity, living for generations in self-falsification (ibid.).
In a special issue of International Journal of Cultural Studies, devoted
to COVID-19 and cultural constructions of global crisis, the editors Paul

Svetlana Hristova
108 Frosh and Myria Georgiou approach COVID-19 as a meta-crisis, or per-

petual crisis-condition which ‘reveals and catalyzes pre-existing potentiali-
ties for catastrophe or transformation, enabling the widespread visibility of
conflicts which were already endemic: systemic crises of wealth and welfare
inequality, scientific expertise, knowledge and truth (the ‘infodemic’), po-
litical leadership, racial discrimination, domestic violence, social isolation,
mediation and civility, migration and borders, religious faith, moral care,
and environmental disaster. It is a crisis of the universality of risk’ (Frosh &
Georgiou, 2022: 240).
No doubts, for a first time in human history a contagion created such
global simultaneity of fear that it was high time to recognize that what we
are surviving globally is not simply a change in the world, but a change of
the world. It started at least 30 years ago when we have already entered into
risk society, diagnosticated by Ulrich Beck as a new stage of modern devel-
opment – ‘responsible modernity’.
The Global Pandemic as a Dress Rehearsal of World Risk

Society: The Emerging New Normal
It seems that what we experienced as COVID-19 crisis can be de-
scribed as a dress rehearsal of the ‘world risk society’, the features of which
can be distinguished point by point in Ulrich Beck’s concept (Hristova,
2021). With his book, written as an immediate response to the Chernobyl

nuclear reactor catastrophe, Beck declared that modernity has entered into
such stage when it began to produce more risks than wealth (Beck, 1986).
While social risks and natural hazards always existed in human history, the
late modernity is marked by a fundamentally new situation when the risks
are a by-product of its own development which ultimately became its main
product: over a long term, the risks are universal, unpredictable, incalcula-
ble and unescapable. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, worldwide
adversity has become part of human condition: today we live on the volcano
of civilization (Beck, 1997), or to use another relevant metaphor, we live on
a melting ice block floating freely in the ocean of uncertainty.
For Ulrich Beck, the ‘risk society’ marks the beginning of a social epoch
in which several dramatic discontinuities occur. The risks bear equalizing
nature: like tiny viruses or nuclear pollution, they are invisible, permeating
through masks, walls and frontiers, attacking all – without respect to culture
or social standing. The risks of late modernity ignore both, class differences
and national borders: ‘with the endangering nature, health, nutrition and so

on […] social differences and limits are relativized’ (Beck, 1997: 36). Thus 109
they ‘display an equalizing effect among them and among those affected by
them. It is precisely therein that their novel political power resides’ (ibid).
Although economic and class differences are still important today, as there
are more or less clearly differentiated groups of risk producers and consum-
ers, gainers and losers1, ultimately risks of late modernization ‘sooner or
later also strike those who produce or profit from them’ (Beck, 1997: 23).
The transition from class to risk society is accompanied also by a value
change: while class society is centred on the ideal of equality, the motive
force of risk society is safety. Today, safety is the key word of the new nor-
mal. With the consequent remission of the desease and the gradual return to
the ‘old ways’, even those activities, once embodying ‘fluid modernity’ with
its global liberal freedoms like travel, tourism, transborder work and life
are now obsessed by the new spirit of safety. The spring 2022 Tripadviser’s
invitations to ‘get back out there… safely’ are accompanied with detailed
‘health and safety checklists’; a special SafeTravels Stamp has been created
for travellers ‘to recognise destinations and businesses around the world
which have adopted the SafeTravels health and hygiene global standardised
protocols for the new normal’ (WTTC, 2022); safe technologies and manu-
als to create safer world with safer cities and safer public spaces are getting
booster during the pandemic. Notably, this strife for safe life goes beyond
the post-pandemic health concerns, it is universal and is reinforced always
when there is a new danger. For example, the recent CoR initiative to pro-
vide summer camps for the Ukrainian children presents the idea as creating
‘a space where they will be able to feel safe and find normality through a
balanced daily routine that could contribute to restoring confidence in the fu-
ture’, thus contributing to the more general vision of Europe as a safe space
(Iolov, 2022, Italic added).
The universal threats fuel also new kind of public solidarity, negative
and defensive in its character as defined by Beck, because it is based not on
the idea to achieve ‘public good’, but rather to avoid ‘public bad’ (Hristova,
2018: 36). This gives raise to ‘responsible modernity’ (Beck, 1997: 9): a
society, globally threatened by natural hazards and political, economic and
social risks, gradually developing new ethics towards nature and the others,
and a new value system of responsibility, substituting reckless consumer-
1
According to a recent research by Richard Florida, Andrés Rodríguez-Pose and
Michael Storper, the impact of the virus has diverged according to geography and
social class, with the least privileged people and places normally seeing the worst
effects (Florida et al., 2021: 5).

Svetlana Hristova
110 ism with ever-growing self-restraint. Less is better is the slogan of various
emerging minimalist lifestyle movements, developed in Western societies
(Europe, USA and Japan) and based on the idea of ‘limited, considered and
sustainable consumption’ (Martin-Woodhead, 2021; Brand et al., 2021).
The awareness of the new universal ‘public bad’ incites not only a new
culture of self-limitation, but also instigates new transnational forms of co-
operation. However, that was not a radically new idea: it was Habermas au
fin de siècle who concluded that globalization of ‘commerce and communi-
cation, of economic production and finance […] and above all of ecological
and military risks, poses problems that can no longer be solved within the
framework of nation-states’ (Habermas, 1998: 106). The pandemic, com-
pared to war, and the virus, presented as enemy, became since the very be-
ginning mobilizing figures in a widely spread public rhetoric. Since the first
months of the pandemic the world leaders took the firm stand to join forces
against the universal threat (Pope Francis, 2020; Guterres, 2020). At the be-
ginning of 2021 a “collaborative, global initiative unlike any other” (Kettler,
2021) was started – a public-private philanthropic joint action, sponsored by
the World Health Organization and the European Commission, uniting gov-
ernments and NGOs, academics and businesses from 190 countries, 92 of
which eligible for donor-funded doses through the COVAX Advance Mar-
ket Commitment (AMC) – an innovative financing mechanism enabling the
world’s poorest countries to gain access to COVID-19 vaccines. Based on
this example, this was interpreted by some authors as emerging global com-
mons. Besides the health as a global concern, ‘in a similar vein, climate
change and other issues like nuclear proliferation, bioterrorism or the refu-
gee crisis are part of the global (or at times regional) commons’ (Madhok,
2021: 204).
Medicalization of human life

During the COVID-19 crisis the trend of medicalization of human life
was further reinforced: wearing masks, no matter how controversial, is just
the least important although the most visible manifestation of the emerg-
ing awareness about living in a constant risk and taking seriously the due
measures against being contaminated or spreading contamination. The new
quickly spreading pandemic of doubtful origin, with unknown course, un-
specified treatment and consequences, and with its high death toll, created
alarming media buzz and growing public anxiety throughout the world, that
naturally raised the interest of people not only in this particular disease, but

more generally – in the biological, even anatomical aspects of functioning 111

of human body which needs healthcare more than fashioning, ‘packaging’
and trimming according to the cultural standards of one or another social
group. The traumatic climate full of fears of possible contamination, suf-
fering, lost and defeat by an unknown virus, continuously rearranged social
and individual priorities among which health became number one. That had
various consequences, reinforcing trends which have already started half a
century ago: growing health anxiety and related consumption of drugs and
supplements; adopting healthier lifestyles; further ‘naturalization’ of human
culture in which body is continuously rationalised and sacralised at the same
time. We shall consider here briefly each of these trends.
Given the ageing of population with relatively big purchase power in
the developed and pharmerging2 countries, the pharmaceutical production
and consumption mark a steady trend of rising. According to the prognosis
of the IQVIA Institute for Human Data Science the global medicine market
– using invoice price levels – is expected to grow at 3–6% CAGR (com-
pound annual growth rate) for the period 2019-2026 to reach the cosmic
$1.8 trillion in total market size by the end of the prognostication. Global
spending on COVID-19 vaccines is modeled to be $250Bn through 2026,
and overall medicine spending is expected to exceed the pre-pandemic out-
look by $133Bn to 2026 (IQVIA 2022). Otherwise said, because of the pan-
demic people in developed and developing countries are increasingly spend-
ing on pills and dietary supplements more than ever before. Alike, the use
of endlessly popping up new medical devices and services is growing, thus
visualizing, measuring and quantifying the function of all human organs.
Human body, once being raised in ‘consumer culture as a bearer of symbolic
value’, ‘as constitutive of the self’ which can be seen even as ‘one of the
defining features of high modernity’ (Shilling, 1993: 3), now is further scru-
tinized, carefully measured and visualized in all its organs and corpuscles,
signifying the beginning of a new cult – of more emphatic, closer to nature,
body-centered culture.
These processes of medicalization of our life with an increased focus
on the body, can be tracked back to the 1970-80s, when as Robert Craw-
ford (1987) notes, culture influenced on the emergence of a new health con-
sciousness (Shilling, 1993: 6). This coincides in the time with the rising eco-
logical awareness, related to the growing concerns about sustainability of
2
‘Pharmerging’ – a newly coined word to denote the emerging for the pharmaceu-
tical market countries such as China, India, Brazil, Russia and others where the
use of pharmaceutical products is rapidly growing.

Svetlana Hristova
112 the planet and the bearing capacity of nature as our physical habitat (WCED,
1987). These trends reinforced each other producing a naturalistic ideologi-
cal blend recognizing the limiting interdependency between human exist-
ence, economic development, social reproduction and nature, that became
extremely popular in eclectic New Age versions accenting on the universal
interconnectedness, monism, spiritual evolution, including among others
mind-body-spirit care and holistic alternative medicine. Thus, there was si-
multaneously growing rationalization of body, turning it into autonomous
subject of the explicit interest of sociological and cultural studies (Turner,
1984, 1987, 1992; Featherstone, 1982; Featherstone et al., 1991; Sennet,
1994; Lipovetsky, 2006); and raising its status to a new cult as an element of
the whole universe, that follows its own divine design, not merely a ‘prod-
uct’ of culture, exemplified in new religious movements like New Age.
Chris Shilling deserves special mention here as in his work Body and
Social Theory he makes an explicit connection between Ulrich Beck’s ‘risk
society’, on the one hand, the spread of self-care regimes, turning body into
‘an island of security in a global system characterized by multiple and in-
escapable risks’ (Shilling 1993: 5), on the other, and thirdly, the ‘tendency
for concern about the body to be globalized’ (ibid., 73). The globally raising
anxieties during the pandemic put under question the body safety as well as
the bodily aspects of ‘normal’ civilized behavior, that had to be solved ‘in
motion’: how to approach somebody without getting too closely; how to
‘shake hands’ or ‘kiss goodbye’ without doing it, how to show a smile or
any face expression behind the mask – the new protocol was invented and
spread as quickly as the advancement of the pandemic. COVID-19 made
more obvious how much the body is an agent of culture, and how much
culture is embodied.
On a more general note, in spite of the confluence of crises and because
of the rising threats, humanity has been heading towards more sustainable,
resilient and healthy way of life. This involves among others the develop-
ment of special technologies for circular economies, green energy produc-
tion, social and cultural inclusive policies and practices, including special
kind of social activism through art, arctivism (Dragićević Šešić et al., 2015),
but also special healthcare policies which sometimes are in conflict with
profit-oriented industries and markets. In 2003 the World Health Organiza-
tion (WHO) adopted Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC).
Currently, there are 182 countries-parties of the Convention, 168 of which
have signed it. According to 2021 global progress report on implementation
of the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control which reflects the

situation as of May 2020, there is a steady progress through the years in the 113
implementation of the FCTC, particularly in the protection from exposure
to tobacco smoke (Article 8) – 85% of all parties; in packaging and labelling
of tobacco products by taking measures to ban misleading descriptors and
to ensure that the tobacco products carry prominent health warnings (Article
11) – 81%; in education, communication, training and raising public aware-
ness (Article 12) – 76%; in eliminating sales to and by minors (Article 16) –
73%. However, among the articles with the lowest implementation rates are
Article 18 about the protection of the environment and the health of persons
– 35%; Article 19 about liability – 31%; and Article 17 about provision of
support for economically viable alternative activities – 13%.
Indicatively, while before the pandemic the policies and regulations
supporting smoke-free areas have been directed towards enclosed spaces
(such as restaurants, bars, pubs, and public transport) as well as indoor of-
fices and workplaces, during the pandemic and soon after, smoking bans
have been extended to open public spaces that could be in a controversy
with the tourism and entertainment logics (or rather – the ‘old normal’ for
tourism and entertainment). In May 2022 Barcelona banned smoking on all
its beaches, and so far, 115 of Spain’s 3514 beaches have prohibited smok-
ing. Moreover, a national law is currently being debated that could turn all
of Spain’s beaches into smoke-free areas (Sarna, 2022). This seems to be a
steady trend that will not be easily changed even after the pandemic will be
contained.
The general trend of medicalization of our life as re-orientation to safer
and healthier habits, accompanied by growing interest in human bodily ex-
istence, can be traced not only in the statistical information, but in the more
poetic language of visual arts. With the outbreak of the pandemics, the pub-
lic focus, hyper-concentrated on health, was recreated through art works as a
new social world of care and empathy. Doctors and medical workers ‘on the
front line’ (again a war metaphor) became public heroes in this new global
imagery, deserving admiration and applauds, echoing in the cities through-
out the whole world. The photo of Dr. Joseph Varon, hugging a helpless old
man, his patient at the United Memorial Medical Center, taken on Thanks-
giving Eve of 26th November 2020, has spread throughout the world with a
speed, higher than the dissemination of the virus, and quickly turned into a
universally acclaimed meme – a visual narrative of the victory of humanity,
kindness and empathy over dehumanizing disease (Figure 1).

Svetlana Hristova
114
Figure 1. The new heroes are here: graffiti on the wall of the Specialized
Hospital for Active Treatment of Infectious and Parasitic Diseases ‘Prof.
Ivan Kirov’, Sofia, 2021.
The growing attention to health and well-being, transferred into an in-

terest in the functioning of human body and its anatomical aspects, some-
times is concentrated especially on the most endangered by COVID-19 hu-
man organs. In the visual arts and crafts that was expressed in the creation of
highly naturalized, anatomically-realistic works presenting human organs,
most often lungs and hearts – offered at the market as strange amulets, home
decorations, anatomy art prints, ‘medical jewelry’, comprising necklaces,
pendants and alike. In a more refined manner, hearts and lungs became an
inspiration for impossibly fragile pieces of art (Jobson 2021), such as the
glass sculptures created by Kit Paulson (Figure 2).

115
Figure 2. 2020. Lungs, Flame-worked borosilicate glass.

Photo © Kit Paulson, shared with permission
This ‘naturalization’ of culture goes together with the emerging public

awareness about responsibility of mankind to nature, but also humanization
of nature, a kind of late-modern animism (Mike Featherstone in the present
volume). The landmark work of Maxim Kantor ‘Mercy’ in a landmark place
(hospital) and landmark time for the world (of risks of new illnesses, natural
disasters and new war conflicts), depicting the myth of St. Jerome healing
the sore paw of a lion (Figure 3), is a gentle reminder that we need today
more than ever a true, unconditional and self-sacrificing mercy that extends
beyond the human realm, encompassing the whole nature. The stained glass
was gifted by the famous artist to the hospital, that has saved the life of
Kantor’s father several times. Thus, the gift turned into a symbolic gesture,
manifesting generosity and altruism, adding value to the leading plot of un-
conditional mercy and elevating the art to a healing process.

Svetlana Hristova
116
Figure 3. Opening of the Maxim Kantor’s ‘Mercy’ stained glass window in the private
hospital ‘I. V. Davydovsky’, October 19, 2021, Moscow.
Another stunning example of this trend is the recent monumental in-

stallation Baby 3.0 by Lorenzo Quinn in Venice, opened on July 14, 2022,
described in the electronic newsletter of European Cities as ‘Rebirth and
Hope’ (Mizzy 2022). Although the sculpture of a baby in a womb, repre-
senting the birth of New Humanity 3.0, is impressive with its size of 7.5
meters high, almost 9 meters wide, and weighs (with the base) 9 tons, the
baby – made of wire mesh (42 000 welding points) looks fragile, immate-
rial, almost invisible during the day, mystically appearing in glows during
the night (Figure 4). The womb – enormous anatomically precise aluminum
pelvis, ‘the only organ that has the capacity to expand and adapt in order
to give life’, as specified by the artist’s curator Amira Gad, envelops and
protects the baby like the most comfortable cradle in the world. The special
location of the monument – the courtyard of Ca ‘Corner della Ca’ Granda,
overlooking the Grand Canal, gives reason to some observers to seek further
analogies with ‘fetus living in the amniotic fluid’ (Bidorini et al., 2022). In
the same vein, ‘from a birds’ eye view, the grand canal resembles the umbili-
cal cord that connects to the sculpture of the baby, adding to the levels of
perspectives from which to perceive the work’ (Gad 2022). Such analogies
are reinforced by the author’s own narrative of the creation of the sculpture

– ‘9 months in the making’ reminding the period of pregnancy, and 7 days 117
for its installation – the divine number of God’s creation of the world.
Figure 4. Baby 3.0 by Lorenzo Quinn, Palazzo Ca’ Corner, Venice, July 15-October 31,
2022. Photo © Dario Beltrame, shared with permission
To understand the work in its entirety it would be helpful to contextual-

ize it within the existing 3.0 titles. The first and the most recognized among
them is the book by professor Max Tegmark Life 3.0: Being Human in the
Age of Artificial Intelligence (2017): a mix of science fiction and a research
on the various impacts of artificial intelligence on human life followed by
alternative scenarios of future developments3. An earlier book with a similar
title Human 3.0, written by Mark Changizi in 2011 ‘before the mass hysteria
of 2020’, is presented in the author’s webpage as a foreboding of the current
2020s. There we are informed, that the book is ‘about human nature and
the societal forces that arise out of it: Mass delusions, cultural evolution,
infectious fear of the infectious, irrational social narratives, and the impacts
of new technologies that bring us upward while simultaneously ripping us
3
Another reminder that future-oriented thinking is one of the features of Risk
Society.

Svetlana Hristova
118 apart’ (Changizi, 2020). Yet, Human 3.0 has a more esoteric version, devel-
oped by the Italian medium Anthony V. Lombardo – Humanity 3.0 which
is perhaps the most probable source of inspiration for Lorenzo Quinn. Its
subtitle is The Ultimate Guide to Thrive within a World on Fire, proclaiming
the need of a trained mind, developed and strengthened through a subset of
skills (transcendent practices), enabling to achieve holistic personal devel-
opment, necessary for the future. This New-Ageistic appeal sounds in sync
with Quinn’s own explanation of his new work delivered in an Instagram
message: ‘We all must go through an evolution in life and aspire to con-
tinuously improve on ourselves, first of all myself. Baby 3.0 wants to be a
symbol of rebirth, a New Humanity based on Empathy, Love and Awareness
towards our natural environment and the life within it.’ Nevertheless, the
artist’s more expansive interpretation in his webpage echoes well another
Italian, this time scientific paradigm – of the cultural economist Pier Luigi
Sacco and his growingly popular theory about Culture 3.0, the socio-techni-
cal regime of our presence, ‘characterized by novel forms of active cultural
participation, where the distinction between producers and users of cultural
and creative contents is increasingly blurred’, and ‘new channels of social
and economic value creation through cultural participation acquire increas-
ing importance’ (Sacco et al., 2018: 7). As he further explicates, ‘the active
character of cultural participation goes beyond the passive absorption of
cultural stimuli, motivating individuals to make use of their skills to contrib-
ute to the process: not simply hearing music, but playing; not simply reading
texts, but writing, and so on. By doing so, individuals challenge themselves
to expand their capacity of expression, to re-negotiate their expectations and
beliefs, to reshape their own social identity. We can consider this behavioral
dynamic as a knowledge-intensive form of the capability building process’
(Ibid). Moreover, cultural participation is ‘the second predictor of psycho-
logical well-being after (presence/absence of) major diseases’ (Sacco et al.
2018: 10). Similarly, Lorenzo Quinn urges the readers on his website: ‘Art
is in theaters and museums, but also in our streets, and I am proud to exhibit
‘Baby 3.0’ in the splendid setting of the Palazzo Ca Corner´s gardens, in
Venice. However, it should involve us all… Because experiencing art makes
us stronger and offers us so much. I want to invite the audience to interact
with the sculpture, to touch it, to feel as if they are a part of it and part of a
wider conversation about the re-birth of humanity after COVID-19, which
involves each individual on the planet. The audience will become an intrin-
sic part of the artwork and through that, provoke emotions and a positive
change’ (Quinn 2022).

This monumental project has been proceeded by an earlier human- 119

size (71,5 x 50 x 66 cm) version, made of marble. Lorenzo Quinn, father
of three himself, enjoys contemplating on the ‘marvelous mystery’ of hu-
man life and its purpose as a ‘a perfect gift of nature.’ The artist reassures
his admirers that ‘We are a better and evolved humanity, a 3.0 version of
ourselves’, and explains his artwork as ‘an emphasis on nature’ that ‘re-
minds us that the work to be done starts within ourselves and for genera-
tions to come’ (Quinn 2021). Even if ‘Baby 3.0’ has not been conceived
in relation to any of the discussed above 3.0 ideas ranging from scientific
through artistic to esoteric, the sculptor’s interpretations sound very much
in tune with them – as Quinn manages to aestheticize the purely anatomi-
cal, to subtilize the biological, to reveal an ultimately spiritual meaning in
a purely natural act; and to connect the hypermodern man and his urban
environment with the universe.
As other trends of the new normal, the medicalization, presented in
various forms through the depicted artworks, is not completely novel. The
special website mediart.eu whose motto is ‘where medicine and art collide’
presents since 2014 various artworks, developing themes which would be
recognized from today’s perspective as very ‘pandemic’. Worth to men-
tion are Fernando Vicente, Clara Castagné and Anne Mondro, among
others, each contributing for the development of some kind of ‘anatomi-
cal art’. The most famous of all representatives of this trend (scandalous
and con-man for some, sensational and even genius for others) is Damian
Hirst, who is not represented at the website, but his works can be seen in
the city center of Leeds, in the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, in British and in-
ternational art museums and galleries. All these artists – by dissecting the
body and visualizing the invisible, have set the trend of anatomical, even
‘dissectionist’ art in which the body is not simply stripped, but its skin is
peeled and everything beneath is exposed in meticulous details – muscles,
bones, even the developing foetus in the womb of a young fragile woman,
replica of Degas’s Little Dancer. Such is the Damien Hirst’s ‘Verity’, 20-m
high and 25-tonne stainless steel and bronze statue, erected in October
2012 at the South-West coast of England in the entrance of the harbor of
the small town Ilfracombe – standing on a heap of books and carrying all
the symbols of Justice and Truth – the sword in an upstretched hand and
scales behind her back (Figure 5).

Svetlana Hristova
120
Figure 5. Verity by Damian Hirst, October 2012, Ilfracombe harbor, UK, Photo © David
Evans, shared with permission.
The difference in the impact of the mentioned works of Damian Hirst

and Lorenzo Quinn is so substantial that it can be taken as a distinguishing
line between two different metanarratives of the relationship between cul-

ture and nature, human and his/her body; art and medicine: while Hirst in his
works is dealing with the transience of life and universal mortality, Quinn
is addressing the re-birth and the eternal human evolution to perfection. In
the case of Hirst’s work, the initial reaction is jarring surprise and even cul-
tural shock. As stated in an interview for CBS News, Damian Hirst doesn’t
want to make an artwork that can be ignored, and really, it is impossible to
ignore it. In his hands, ‘anatomical models became giant sculptures, medi-
cine cabinets became shrines for multi-coloured pills’ (D’Amelio 2019). His
work often shows preoccupation with death. The artist quotes his mom, who
advised him to accept the inevitable, and in his understanding this means to
meet death vis-à-vis: everything, even the mythological (‘Hymn’, the ‘Anat-
omy of Angel’, ‘Myth’) is revealed in ‘flesh and bones’, otherwise said – in
anatomical materiality, exposed to ageing, decay, and extinction; nothing is
hidden anymore and there is no place for new dreams and new hopes, the
sacred is sacrificed on the altar of artist’s Ego and thus desacralized, life is
simply mortal, and that’s it.

In the last Post-pandemic work of Lorenzo Quinn, the opposite effect 121
is achieved: of elevation of the heavy body, of return to the deepest meaning
of life, connecting humans to heaven, restoring the sacred by relating it to its
initial bearer – human body, in its divine unity with mind and spirit. During
the COVID-19 social bonds have been dissociated; people have been turned
on a massive scale into helpless patients – isolated and subjected to lonely
suffering; now Quinn offers monumental beauty for the eyes and hope for
the souls: here we are, the reborn Mankind 3.0 – closer to Perfection body
and spirit, fragile and strong, created in love and endowed with dreams, fully
capable to evolve in tune with Nature, in harmony with the whole Universe.
The New Global of the New Normal

If the emerging new normal will be led by search of safety in all its
various manifestations, its counterpart, the new global will be similarly less
daring and reckless, and more self-restrained. There is already a broad con-
sensus about COVID-19 as a systematic consequence of the process of glo-
balization (Shreshta et al. 2020), accompanied by growing insights that what
we have just survived is a turning point in history when the peak of globali-
zation is over (Gray 2020). As pandemic has disrupted global supply chains
and production networks and caused mobility halts throughout the world,
many took this as a sign of deglobalization. For other scholars COVID-19
served just as deglobalization amplifier, implying that the trend has been
set much earlier (Dandolov, 2021; Martinez, 2021). For Matthew Martinez
the notion of deglobalization holds two entirely economic meanings: One
propagates the idea that ‘local manufacturers are in danger of foreign com-
petition’. The other describes ‘periods of history when economic trade and
investment were in decline’. Thus, for Martinez moments of deglobalization
include World War I, World War II and the 2008 financial crisis in the U.S.
‘Both events led to economic downturns in many other countries, which
led to periods of distrust toward globalization’ (Martinez, 2021). However,
deglobalization – understood as a process counter to globalization – is far
more complex, including various political, social, and cultural aspects and
far reaching consequences leading to restructuring of economies, re-border-
ing of societies and reinforcing of nation-states.
With the advance of the tourist summer season, the list of countries
cancelling their travel bans and border restrictions is growing up, but there
are other, more substantial effects of the recent and still ongoing pandemic
that affect the core of our culture – our way of acting and interacting with the

Svetlana Hristova
122 world, our waning risk-taking attitudes, marking the end of the ‘desire that
desires desire’ (Bauman, 1998: 38), otherwise, the decline of everything that
once constituted the spirit of capitalism and its late consumerist manifesta-
tions. On the other hand, there are many signs of less visible, less material,
data-based processes that keep the world tight in a digital web. John Gray,
who was one of the first, declaring the end of the globalization – as known
until now, considers that there are two counter processes of de– and re-
globalization, taking place simultaneously: ‘Our lives are going to be more
physically constrained and more virtual than they were. A more fragmented
world is coming into being that in some ways may be more resilient. De-
globalization could well be occurring on some levels, while re-globalization
intensifies on others’ (Gray, 2020). In a similar vein, Mike Featherstone
concludes in his introductory text devoted the 30th anniversary of the special
issue ‘Global Culture’ of Theory, Culture and Society Journal: ‘The world
may be more fragmented, on one level, but it may be more connected on
another, as new technological developments such as artificial intelligence,
machine learning, blockchain, 3-D printing, robotics, facilitate working at a
distance and greater global connectivity’ (Featherstone, 2020: 5).
While the life is slowly bouncing back and the outlines of the new nor-
mal are gradually emerging, it seems that the big question now is for how
long and with how much less mobility the man, that has grown up in hyper-
mobile civilization, can endure? Although according to the UNWTO World
Tourism Barometer, the international tourism boasts 182% year-on-year in-

crease in January-March 2022, with Europe leading the recovery with four
times as many international arrivals (+280%) as in Q1 of 2021, followed by
the Americas where the arrivals doubled (+117) in the same three months,
they were still 43% in Europe and 46% in the Americas below 2019 levels
respectively. In view of the high uncertainty of the complete virus contain-
ment, as well as the tension from the Russian invasion into Ukraine, experts
cautiously postpone their assessments of the full recovery of tourist flows
for 2023 and 2024 (UNWTO 2022). Now it becomes painfully obvious that
the whole previously finely-orchestrated global travel and tourism industries
have been completely dis-coordinated by the virus: by the mid 2022, while
European and American destinations were lifting or easing the travel re-
strictions, major outbound markets, mostly in Asia and the Pacific, declared
closure (ibid).
On the other hand, the various travel and movement restrictions, lock-
downs, quarantine and self-isolation measures, and tighten border control,
enforced by states during the pandemic, gave rise to talk about reborder-

ing of societies (Genova 2022), and even vaccine nationalism (Aradau and 123
Tazzioli 2021: 9). The rebordering of societies, initiated during the pandem-
ic, is still valid in many parts of the world, including rigorous border control
in Europe – if not due to pandemic, the war in Ukraine and the immigration
policies are another good reason. But again, we can trace this process back
to 2015, during the refugee crisis, leading to raising walls along the outer
EU borders: while in 1990 there were 15 border walls in the world, by 2016
their number raised to almost 70 according to the estimation of the geogra-
pher Reece Jones (Tasch 2016).
From practical point of view the new global is understood primarily as
a dichotomy between cheap and safe – in favour of the latter. Notably, the
trends developed during the high day of the pandemic, are reinforced by the
Russian-Ukrainian conflict. In this context, Spencer Bokat-Lindell, a New
York Times’s editor, continues to envisage the possible end of globaliza-
tion in terms of decline of international trade and financial flows, a process
that started after the Great Recession and intensified during the pandemic.
Now the war is accelerating the shift towards national self-sufficiency, that
could result economically in surge of prices but increase of domestic jobs:
‘If globalization resulted in a wave of cheap consumer goods, its opposite
could push prices higher, worsening the effects of inflation […] Rather than
the cheapest, easiest and greenest sources […] there’ll probably be more of
a premium put on the safest and surest’ (Bokat-Lindell, 2022). For Lindell,
this could also mean not so much growing autarkies, but rather new block
alliances (ibid).
Certainly, the emerging trends are more than contradictory. The urge
for safety can easily be transformed into medical safetycracy, suspending
the rule of law and imposing biopolitics in which the political debate is cen-
tered on the naked life (Agamben, 2004). At the very start of the pandemic,
Giorgio Agamben briefly commented for the Positions, an electronic journal
for critical open debate in the field of social and humanitarian studies, that
the extension of the state of exception in Italy is provoked by an unmoti-
vated emergency (Agamben, 2020). The French philosopher Bernard-Henri
Lévy briefly after the outbreak of the pandemic, openly warned us of this
state of emergency, when ‘Never had we seen, as we did in Europe, heads of
state surrounding themselves with scientific councils before daring to speak’
(Levy, 2020, quoted after Smith, 2020).
For the Italian sociologist and sociotherapist Stefano Scarcella Prand-
straller, the measures in the political management, based on the epidemio-
logical emergency, otherwise said iatrocracy (Smith 2020), adopted by the

Svetlana Hristova
124 Italian government (but also by several other governments in the EU and
the rest of the world), may vary from safetycracy in the strict sense to thera-
peutic regimen (Scarcella Prandstraller, 2022). What unites these stages and
forms of biopolitics, is that they represent the new paradigm of power, based
on the protection of life, with the instrumental use of science in the medical
and biological field, on the one hand, and technological tools for connectiv-
ity and artificial intelligence, on the other’ (Aletta, 2020).
Indeed, in comparison with previous major pandemics, COVID-19 oc-
curred in times of mature technological capacity to facilitate greater global
connectivity (Featherstone, 2020) and simultaneously enabling to isolate
and trace specific individuals (Barry, 2020: 10). In their analysis of the im-
pact of digital technologies on the changing forms of data-driven production
and accumulation, Petter Törnberg and Justus Uitermark reveal the deeply
pervasive consequences of the datafication as commodification of social re-
lations and financialization of economy and human life, that enable capital-
ism to be reborn digitally (Tomberg & Uitermark, 2022: 579).
Likewise, re-enforced by the ‘digital capitalism’ (ibid.), the new global
has been reborn digitally. Sociotechnical apparatuses of all kinds, providing
‘digital fix’ in any problematic field now constitute the promised land of
salvation that hyperglobalization could not reach – starting from home of-
fices, live streams and conferences, 3-D printing and distant operations, and
ending with the ‘messy’ matter of love, becoming ‘an ever more pervasive
part of the mobile digital lives of the global youth’ (Bandinelli and Gandini,
2022: 423). The enlarging list of ‘digital nomad visas’ issued in 47 countries
throughout the world (Valencia, 2022) to which Bulgaria recently joined,
or the emergence of the first ‘digital villages’ (Iolov, 2021) is an attempt to
boost international tourism and to attract and retain for a longer period of
time better educated tech-savvy predominantly young people working digi-
tally, by offering local advantages in the growingly depopulated countries
and regions of Europe and other parts of the world. This leads to further
mixing of populations even within the framework of the new digital global.
Even if the hyper-extended economic globalization is over today, the results
of the former relocation of large masses of people from different ethnic,
language, religious and cultural communities, economic migrants and politi-
cal refugees, tourists and vagabonds, the heroes and victims of postmoder-
nity (Bauman, 1996) cannot be cancelled. Although the value exchange and
production lines have been reassembled back within the national or close
regional territories, it is impossible to imagine the world within its former
borders, even though tightened today: the diversified citizens on the streets

and public spaces of our cities, the multilingualism of even less educated 125
people and at the earliest possible age – starting from the kindergartens and
primary schools; all these are the marks of a changed cultural landscape of
growingly global hybridity. The globalization in its neoliberal form – tend-
ing to transborder economic superstructures, unbound from their nation-
states, but lacking a unifying culture, now has already produced its own
negation – economic enterprises, more respectful – under the global threats
– to the national boundaries and priorities, but operating within the globally
unified networks of digital prosumers, in the socio-technical regime of Cul-
ture 3.0. This digital shadow of this new global is growing bigger, stronger
and longer, but this does not herald the sunset of globalization.
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The joined archive of hundreds of Central-, East- and South-East-European publishers,

CRISES AND CULTURES 105

THE CRISIS AS USUAL OR LIVING

Abstract: Globalization, spelled out as the triumph of neoliberalism and

Introduction: Crisis, COVID-19 and Globalization

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as one of the ﬁrst theorists of globalization, made a remarkable observation

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The Crisis as Usual or Living on the Volcano of Civilization...

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108 Frosh and Myria Georgiou approach COVID-19 as a meta-crisis, or per-

The Global Pandemic as a Dress Rehearsal of World Risk

2021). With his book, written as an immediate response to the Chernobyl

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The Crisis as Usual or Living on the Volcano of Civilization...

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Medicalization of human life

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The Crisis as Usual or Living on the Volcano of Civilization...

more generally – in the biological, even anatomical aspects of functioning 111

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The Crisis as Usual or Living on the Volcano of Civilization...

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The growing attention to health and well-being, transferred into an in-

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The Crisis as Usual or Living on the Volcano of Civilization...

Figure 2. 2020. Lungs, Flame-worked borosilicate glass.

This ‘naturalization’ of culture goes together with the emerging public

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Another stunning example of this trend is the recent monumental in-

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The Crisis as Usual or Living on the Volcano of Civilization...

To understand the work in its entirety it would be helpful to contextual-

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The Crisis as Usual or Living on the Volcano of Civilization...

This monumental project has been proceeded by an earlier human- 119

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The diﬀerence in the impact of the mentioned works of Damian Hirst

line between two diﬀerent metanarratives of the relationship between cul-

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The Crisis as Usual or Living on the Volcano of Civilization...

The New Global of the New Normal

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Tourism Barometer, the international tourism boasts 182% year-on-year in-

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The Crisis as Usual or Living on the Volcano of Civilization...

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The Crisis as Usual or Living on the Volcano of Civilization...

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tion Ampliﬁer | Geopolitical Monitor [Accessed May 1 2022].

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The Crisis as Usual or Living on the Volcano of Civilization...

Featherstone, Mike (2020) Problematizing the Global: An Introduction to 127

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