Pandemics and Other Systemic Crises: Interesting Times, Matters of Concern, and Tentacular Thinking

Abstract

The current SARS-CoV-2 pandemic underscores the failed model with which we recurrently face the crises that affect our world, from climate change and the recent refugee emergencies, to the rise of political extremisms in Western societies. As the feminist philosopher Donna Haraway and the sociologist and philosopher Bruno Latour argue, a paradigm shift and a redefinition of subjectivity are necessary to confront the Anthropocene. The Venice Biennale 2019, “May You Live in Interesting Times”, curated by Ralph Rugoff, proposed an experimental model of artistic thought (which I will call “tentacular” utilizing the theory developed by Haraway) that questioned the paradigms inherited from the Enlightenment, and also, to a certain extent, from postmodernism. Due to its philosophical depth, this show is comparable to “Les Immatériaux” (1985), the historical exhibition curated by the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, who famously conceptualized postmodernism and the experience of the “postmodern sublime”. This last concept will serve to establish a contrast with the “tentacular sublime”, the contemporary experience manifested in the recent biennial.