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Short abstract:

I examine how a particular urgency has shaped COVID 19-modeling as mode in which the state of emergency is inscribed into the practice of pandemic modeling. Following the interpermeation of temporality and affect, I sketch the way the urge of urgency is enacted as an instisting force.

Long abstract:

In my dissertation, I examine how the state of emergency during the COVID-19 pandemic has been inscribed into the practice of pandemic modeling. A key aspect of this inscription is a specific affective atmosphere that has shaped the process of knowledge production. In this presentation, I focus on an intensified urgency as prominent feature of this atmosphere reported by almost all the modelers I interviewed for my research.

As Niklas Luhmann has argued, omnipresent urgency is a consequence of functionally differentiated and highly complex societies, where factual, social, and temporal dimensions mutually constrain each other, leading to time scarcity and suboptimal decisions. However, scholars in the governing-emergencies debate have pointed out that urgency intensifies in emergency situations in specific ways. At the core of emergency practices, the urge of urgency acts as an insisting force in which temporality and affectivity interpermeate each other.

In my presentation, I outline the urgency of COVID-19 modeling in three steps, exploring the interpermeation of temporality and affectivity. After examining the literature on urgency with regard to conceptual points of connection, I show, on this basis, a recursive relationship between the urgency of modeling practice and political practice. I then turn my attention to deadlines as an element that not only plays a central role in the creation of urgency in modeling practice but also interweaves temporality and affectivity in a way that enables the accelerated production of emergency knowledge.