15 International negotiations

On April 30, 2020, Chinese Embassy at France, posted on their twitter account a 99-second pandemic-related video in English, entitled “Once Upon a Virus…”, narrating a version of global conversations regarding the events leading up to that moment. The condensation of a range of political and aesthetic genres in the context of mass communication reveals not only ideological differences but also the layers of aesthetic and cultural history.

The clip starts with the unveiling of curtains and an Americana piano tune. With these cues, the dramatic and staged qualities of the making of the event are expressed. Perhaps typical of a Marxian artistic interventions , there is a tendency towards the denaturalization of natural perception by making the artistic frame present instead of pushing it back into the background, thereby allowing the suspension of disbelief (Benjamin, 1998).

Quickly, a Lego piece labeled December falls between clouds as the narrative voice—the same as the one Chinese subject has—moves the audience along the chronological time. The stage is divided into two patches of green lawns that do not touch, perhaps indicating the continental separation and ideological divides. On the left side, a masked yellow toy with an arrow representing and speaking for China is placed. On the right side his interlocutors come and go. These include the World Health Organization emblem and the bronze Statue of Liberty. Her face is cartoonishly redrawn and added a mustache, also she has been given a distorted childish voice through speeding-up—an old-school form of infantilization.

The dialogue revolves around the question of responsibility, with the Chinese figure listing the steps taken including the timely warning issued to the WHO, mask regulations, the rapid construction of temporary hospitals, and forced quarantines. In response, the Statue of Liberty voices not only official US policies but the opinions circulating on social media at large, including Agamben’s comparison of measures such as tracking and quarantine to concentration camps. Thus, the Statue of Liberty becomes the mouth of Western societies, ‘the free world’—not just the official statements of the US government. In this regard, the narrative does not recognize the separation of civil society and political bodies as relevant, or perhaps political unconscious animating the narrative finds this division between socio-political spheres an obstacle to its signifying process.

At the beginning of the pandemic, the online rumor had it that the virus was transmitted from animals to humans and that the abnormal culinary habits found in Chinese culture were responsible for the global catastrophe[11]. If the video doesn’t directly address this tension as such, it nevertheless employs the terms of the insult and, moreover, portrays the statue of liberty denouncing the lock-down as barbaric and as typical of the third world. The last part of the video involves the Statue of Liberty blaming the Chinese after the numbers rose in the West and dropped in China (“You lied”, “You kept things secret”, “You didn’t warn us” and so on”) and ends with the Chinese figure’s ironic comment “That’s what I love about Americans, your consistency.”

The infamous impersonal voice of bureaucracy embodying rational course of history is substituted with one of dialogical subjectivity. Yet no one is named. The icon of Statue of Liberty subsumes heterogenous voices and experiences into a unity. Ideological coloring of biopolitical reception of the pandemic as an event are addressed yet not in immediately Marxist terms terms even if historical materialist sensibilities are at work in the aesthetics of this political message. A colonialist rhetoric is chosen as an adversary. In response to the claims of the incivility of provincial culinary habits, the theme of infantile irresponsibility is developed as the counter-interpellative strategy.

The analysis of the normative structure of the pandemic is not confined to its occasioning of new forms of what we would classically call ideological work (see part 3 on power and subjectivity). With these digital performances, the difference between descriptive and prescriptive, discursive and statistical, ground of ‘social fact’ are becoming problematic . At the heart of the sociological problematic lies the definition of norm. At the foundation of the discipline, norms are described as both statistical regularities, as frequencies, and as rules and collective representations. The tension between these two ways of thinking the social becomes apparent in the above-analyzed digital scenes. It is also symptomatic of the non-alignment between administrative parameters and other political technologies that shape populations.

As a result, the changing character of the social is one of the most pressing questions of the digital era, given that classical institutions which manifested some of the external collective conditions to which individuals were subjected are either dissolving or over-coded by other functionalities under a new technological environment. Yet this doesn’t necessarily give way to a magically unconditioned social space where once subordinated elements of the disciplinary arrangements can now effectively assume any shape. In fact, the immanent character of the measuring apparatus in digital social milieus, such as timelines, deeply conditions subjectivity and cultural forms. Populations are formed and segmented in movement. Foucault distinguishes between normations of disciplinary power and the normalization of security. His explanations help shed light on the production of the facticity of the pandemic in its circulation through the series of supplements that come to constitute it.

We will now offer a close reading of this originary moment where Durkheim attempted to define the social fact. We will articulate its ambiguities so that this analysis can reveal the constitutive gaps, dissonances, and slips at the foundations of sociology. In turn, this symptomatology will allow an understanding of how the social is different in digital times, using the pandemic as an epitome. The quoted sections will demonstrate, in this moment that demands a search for the distinctive legitimacy of sociology as a discipline, that Durkheim collapses yearly statistical regularities, such as birthrates, with behavior regulating values and impersonal instruments, such as language and currency, in that they are all external to any given individual, thus predetermining their possibilities.

What falls under this category of the social fact? Roles, obligation, system of signs, monetary system. If Durkheim shows in one step their independence, in the next step he conceives a relation of power that normalizes, regulates, sanctions. Beyond their difference, externality and a dynamic force undercuts the elements that make up sociality. Thus, there is nothing essentially discursive, grammatical, syntactic, semiotic—in short exclusively ideological—about the social. In fact, already in Durkheim, the social is simply a matter of perspective taken on power. Yet this power is not a potential force kept in reserve and controlled by an external subjective agency who oversees its discharge, but it is a dynamic field that traverses the individuations that presuppose it. Following the establishment of a social fact through its practical traces, Durkheim will propose a theoretical definition of the social fact whose ontology will depend on perceptibility afforded by statistical abstraction. Yet in this move a profound shift in register occurs. What, for instance, is the ontological difference between language as social fact and birth-rates as social fact? Are the rates of currency exchange by which people relate to one another similar to the number of suicides across years in the way each presents an externality and coerciveness over individual phenomena? In this epistemological ambiguity, Durkheim is doing nothing short of facing the fundamental multiplicity (oscillation between statistical regularities/frequencies and the regulative idea) underpinning the notion of the social. Yet he avoids elaborating on this multivalence insofar as it puts at risk his project that identifies a presumed unity of the collective mind with sociality.

Rethinking the social fact in digital environments

The two elements—externality and the coercive aspect—which, for Durkheim, defined the sociality of the social fact vis-à-vis individual phenomena, are both present in digital environments. Indeed a new synthesis is the emergent quality of both statistical normalization and ideological constitution of society. More and more floating populations are formed around (and not merely within) official political parameters—but as expressions of segmented regularities of digital media use which draws on but exceeds demographic variables. As classical sociologists inquired into opportunity structures that determine the chances of one’s class-mobility and criminality,  probabilistic mechanisms of social facts ground the individual’s relationship to society. Here, probability functions as the transcendence of the opposition of determinism and randomness, order and chaos, as it incorporates both of these principles while overcoming their limitations.

Descriptive understanding of the social fact, grasped as encompassing any number of regularities that express a social quality, is in line with the 21st-century processes of datafication. Yet, due to his humanist assumptions, his anti-materialism and his neopositivism, Durkheim was led to equate sociality with collective representations or what he terms the collective mind. He was therefore unable to fully propose a processual social theory of the multiplicity of social facts whereby an incomplete set of historically finite subjects, objects (products of labor), and environments, may acquire agentic quality.

From the analysis of digital political performances relating to the facticity of the pandemic, we gather that societies—whether they are identified by populations or effective political boundaries—do not have unities; each representation of society is a technical, performative, and forceful act of imagination—a perspective; a framing from a specific point of view. Thus, while conceiving the political character of sociality anew in these digital times,  one can salvage the relative externality and coerciveness of social facts from Durkheim’s foundational demarcation of sociology, without its presupposed unity and uniformity. Deconstruction of his concept of social fact lays bare these characteristics:

• Disunity—multiple points of views without necessary coherence—. This can be also named the cubist principle;
• Non-simultaneity of society to itself—Different epistemic practices including sciences, journalistic reportages, literary accounts, popular conversations and abstract parameters operate at relatable but different ontic registers. As a result they produce different temporalities;
• Non-identity—there is no single center nor a single outside-point of view from which multiplicities can be gathered into a collective mind without this being equal to disappearance to the level of the social.  Social facts can exist, as external and coercive processes without unity, simultaneity, or identity.

Different expressions of the supposedly global, unifying event of the pandemic, its fundamentally contested facticity lays bare this multiplicity of the social fact.

Works Cited

Benjamin, W. (1998). Understanding Brecht (A. Bostock, Trans.). Verso. (Original work published 1931–1939)

Durkheim, É. (1982). The rules of sociological method (S. Lukes, Ed.; W. D. Halls, Trans.). Free Press. (Original work published 1895)

Foucault, M. (2007). Security, territory, population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978 (M. Senellart, Ed.; G. Burchell, Trans.). Palgrave Macmillan.

Tufekci, Z. (2025, March 16). We were badly misled about the event that changed our lives. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/16/opinion/covid-pandemic-lab-leak.html