Introduction

The New England Journal of Medicine editorial on the COVID-19 pandemic penned by Anthony Fauci and colleagues was appropriately titled ‘Navigating the Uncharted’ (Fauci et al, 2020). One of the chief features of the COVID-19 crisis is that we find ourselves in a shifting landscape. The resulting disorientation (the sense of ‘navigating the uncharted’) extends beyond health research and into many domains of our individual and collective lives. We suffer from political disorientation (the alleged need for a radical shift in economic thinking; Michie, 2020), from social disorientation (the sudden rearrangement of social dynamics based on distancing measures; Abel and McQueen, 2020) and from temporal disorientation (the warping of our sense of time during lockdown; Cellini et al, 2020; Casati 2020; Perroy, 2020), to name but a few. This multifarious state of disorientation has substantial effects on wellbeing and decision making (Qiu et al, 2020; Roy et al, 2020; Rajkumar, 2020). In this chapter, we review the multiple dimensions of disorientation of the COVID-19 crisis and use state- of- the art research on disorientation to gain insight into the social, psychological and political dynamics of the current pandemic.

Given the profusion of spatial metaphors in language (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980), it is no surprise that we find plenty of expressions that refer to being lost in a metaphorical, not- quite- spatial sense. On some occasions ‘we lose track of time’, and we might be ‘lost in thought’ when someone asks us a question, or feel ‘at a loss’ in a given social situation. Disorientation generates powerful metaphors, and has therefore been evoked in a broad range of contexts (Alexander, 1996; Cresswell, 1996; Crang, 2001; Lefebvre, 2004; Stiegler, 2009, Cadet, 2010; O’Neill, 2011; Marouan and Simmons, 2013; Saunders, 2016; Schmidt di Friedberg, 2018). A question one should address before taking metaphors of disorientation too far is to what degree and how non-spatial cases of disorientation correspond to the prototypical, spatial cases. What are the features, or the structures, if any, that are common to getting lost while visiting a foreign city, on the one hand, and getting lost socially, politically, temporally, on the other? This is not an issue that has been thoroughly addressed in the academic literature.