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ABSTRACT
The topic of borders is an active research area in Lotmanian studies. Starting from this scholarship, the article aims to open up fresh possibilities for interpretation of Lotman's spatial-driven theory, making it dialogue with the cultural affect studies and the current communication-focused research on the digital sphere. This theoretical framework underpins the case study covered in the essay, that is, the linguistic analysis of online narratives on migration during the COVID-19 pandemic – a prolonged situation of high-intensity relational affect in which emotions played a pivotal (agentive) role in the perception of a widespread and multidimensional crisis. Argentina is the cultural milieu of socio-semiotic scrutiny, in which distant reading and close reading cross-pollinate each other.
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Correction Statement
This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1 In this paper “border” and “boundary” are used interchangeably to express the Russian concept of granitsa (граница). For an insightful exploration of these two terms see Hagen (Citation2021).
2 In this work, unlike in others, Lotman focuses on the subject who intentionally decides to become an alien otherness. He/she can be culturally configured as a subject in search of a foreign and virgin land that needs to be crowed, or as a subject who sees the leaving of the known world – perceived as if it was cursed – “as a rupture, a desertion, or an escape from it. (…) the person who abandons it goes away, without looking back, like Lot and his daughters. In this case, the person acts as a refugee, a fugitive, and his/her relationship with the world that has been abandoned is presented beforehand as negative” (Lotman Citation1992–Citation93a, n.d.).
3 I use the word “subjectivity”, but it is worth remembering that Lotman (Citation1990, 138) talks about “personality” (личность/lichnost’). For more details on the meaning of this term, I refer to Caryl Emerson (Citation2008, 30), who points out that lichnost’ comes from litso, “the generic Russian word for face”, and is “the abstract noun palely rendered in English as ‘personality’”: an imperfect translation, since in Russian spiritual philosophy [lichnost’] always implies moral and interpersonal responsibility”.
4 Throughout his work, Lotman talks of “conflict” (конфликт / konflikt), “contradiction” (противоречие / protivorechie), “collision” (столкновение / stolknovenie), “fight” (борьба/bor’ba).
5 “Vulnerable condition” here refers to a family economic situation that is close to or below the poverty line and, in most cases, linked to labor informality.
6 The lockdown decree (No. 297/2020) took effect on 20 March and was extended several times until 16 August 2020 under the name of Social, preventive, and mandatory isolation (known by its Spanish acronym ASPO). After that date, the government began to speak of Mandatory, preventive and social distancing, and Social, preventive and mandatory isolation (Decree No. 677/2020), softening the discourse and leveraging the word “distancing” rather than “isolation”. This decision was also made to differentiate geographic areas of the country that were showing different epidemiological growth rates.
Broadly speaking, strict measures of social distancing and isolation, especially in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires (CABA) and in Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area (AMBA), continued until spring 2021.
7 Among the economic measures that most evoked controversy is the Emergency Family Income (known by its Spanish acronym IFE) for most vulnerable, the prohibition of dismissal of employees and the double indemnity in the case of dismissal, the temporary rent freeze, and the suspension of evictions.
8 In specific, on 12 August 2021, photos of First Lady Fabiola Yáñez's birthday party in 2020 surfaced, unmasking the breaking of the quarantine at the presidential residence during the strictest phase of the Coronavirus lockdown.
9 While focusing on the migration issue, this article can also enrich the investigations on a possible typologization of “semiopolitical responses” to the explosion of COVID-19, of which an introductory exploration can be found in Sedda (Citation2021).
10 On the methodological feasibility of making a qualitative perspective (small stories) and a quantitative perspective (big data) coexist in the corpus approach see Page (Citation2018, 32–33).
11 I entered the word “extranjer*” with the * operator in order to look for the root of the noun/adjective avoiding specification of gender and number (feminine/masculine and singular/plural). By doing so, all four grammatical possibilities could have been appeared (extranjera/extranjero and extranjeras/extranjeros), as well as the variants related to the so-called inclusive language (such as “extranjeres”, “extranjerxs”, “extranjer@s”).
12 Interestingly, the question of the violence against women, the rape and the feminicide are diffusely mentioned in the analyzed corpora, intertwining with the presence of the foreigner. Although its scrutiny goes beyond the direct scope of this paper, it is undoubtedly a topic that should be explored and that brings the semiotic approach and the historical-anthropological one into dialogue.
13 “Dictatorship” is an expression commonly used by Twitter users. Although the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela has not been formally defined as a dictatorship, several international organisms have talked about a “rupture of the constitutional and democratic order”.