Aesthetic Reconfigurations of the Political during the Pandemic: Group Representations in Covid19 Special Programmes on German Public Television

Abstract

We analyse audiovisual media discourse on Covid-19 through the lens of the political
in order to illustrate how discursive practices establish and reconfigure subject positions
and social orders in times of crisis. Drawing on Jacques Rancière’s understanding of the
political, we suggest that these reconfigurations can either stabilise existing (political)
communities and power relations, or intervene in what is perceived as ‘normal’.
Analytically, we approach these (re)configurations on the level of media-aesthetics (the
tangible), language (the utterable) and audiovisual representation (the visible) to
demonstrate how a sense of commonality is produced or revised through artistic media
practice (Richard Rorty).
We demonstrate our argument by means of Covid-19 ‘special programmes’ on
German public television, as they can be considered cultural practices of making situated
sense of a global crisis. By analysing the tangible, the utterable and the visible in the
broadcast from 13 December 2020, our illustrative analysis reveals a constant struggle
between reconfigurations of the political and stabilisations of (a new) normalcy. We
conclude with a plea for including a media-aesthetic perspective into the analysis of Covid19 discourse as it opens up a more comprehensive (multimodal) idea and experiential
dimension of the discursive construction of the pandemic.