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The bibliography below consists of sources of research concerning dystopia in literature and film. 

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Accueil Numéros 32 Coda Pandemic Fictions: Covid-19 and t...

Pandemic Fictions: Covid-19 and the Cultures of Dystopia

Since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, dystopian imaginaries have been used to describe both the threat posed by the virus and the public health restrictions implemented to contain its spread. They have fuelled panic buying and conspiracy theories, and have informed public discourse and government rhetoric. Dystopian works like 1984 , The Eyes of Darkness , The Matrix and Black Mirror have been lauded for their foresight, while former health secretary, Matt Hancock, has stated that watching Contagion affected his planning of the vaccine rollout. This essay reflects on the relationship between dystopian cultures and Covid-19, examining, firstly, the role that figurations of dystopia have played in the collective and political response to the pandemic. Contextualising the British government’s handling of the crisis in the political culture of neoliberalism, the essay uses the concept of dystopia to underline the continuity of this response with the politics of the decade that preceded it – in the aborted pursuit of “herd immunity”, for example; the non-transparent conferment to private-sector companies, with little or no public health expertise, of contracts worth billions; and the authoritarian use of Covid legislation. The essay argues that it is the loss of impulses and discourses that challenge the status quo that marks the truly dystopian aspect of the pandemic. I t explores, finally, the cultural implications of this, questioning the value we place on culture and the work we ask of it in times of crisis, and probing the political utility therein of the notion of dystopia.

Les supermarchés dévalisés par les clients paniqués, l’isolement des individus forcés de passer des heures devant les écrans, la prolifération des théories complotistes, ainsi que le recours à une rhétorique guerrière, apparaissent comme autant d’exemples de l’importance de l’imaginaire dystopique dans la représentation de la crise du Covid-19. Les références à des modèles du genre sont aussi parfois mentionnées explicitement par les politiques eux-mêmes, à l’instar de l’ancien ministre britannique de la santé, Matt Hancock, qui déclara que le film  Contagion  l’avait aidé à planifier la stratégie vaccinale. Cet article s’attache ainsi à analyser l’influence de l’imaginaire dystopique sur les discours politiques et médiatiques au Royaume-Uni lors de la crise du Covid-19. Inscrivant la gestion de la pandémie par le gouvernement dans le contexte d’une décennie de culture politique conservatrice néolibérale, l’article montre aussi comment le concept de dystopie peut à son tour s’appliquer à la gestion politique de la crise par le gouvernement britannique : la stratégie un temps envisagée de l’immunité collective, impliquant le sacrifice de personnes médicalement vulnérables dont les décès « excédentaires » seraient considérés comme « collatéraux », prend des accents dystopiques proches du langage de l’eugénisme. L’attribution de contrats à hauteur de milliards de livres à des entreprises du secteur privé, sans aucune expertise en matière de santé publique, relève d’une distribution oligarchique et non transparente du pouvoir. Enfin, l’article s’intéresse aux conséquences de ce type de politique sur la culture et s’interroge sur le rôle de celle-ci en temps de crise, ainsi que sur l’utilité politique du concept de dystopie.

Entrées d’index

Mots-clés : , keywords: , texte intégral.

1 Content Provider , comedian Stewart Lee’s live show first previewed in late 2016, begins with a quandary. After a month’s work on the show, conceived as “two hours on the notion of the individual in a digitised free-market economy”, the Brexit referendum happened, “and there seemed to be an assumption everywhere that I should’ve written some jokes about Brexit”. Lee continues:

Now I haven’t written any jokes about Brexit, ’cos I was trying to write a show that I could keep on the road for eighteen months, and as I didn’t know how Brexit was going to pan out, I didn’t write any jokes about it in case I couldn’t use them in the show and monetise the work I’ve done. Right. So I haven’t written any jokes about Brexit, ’cos I didn’t see the point of committing to a course of action for which there’s no logical or financial justification. (Lee 2019, 296)

• 1 https://www.wsj.com/articles/englishness-review-volcanic-island-11622233044?redirect=amp#click=http (...)
• 2 The UK left the EU on January 31 st , 2020; the day before, 84-year-old Peter Attwood from Kent becam (...)
• 3 https://edition.cnn.com/2021/09/12/business/brexit-reality-bites-in-britain-intl-gbr-cmd/index.html (...)
• 4 For some, global crisis confirmed the hybris of “going it alone”, with the government accused of “p (...)

5 https://www.politico.eu/article/uk-keir-starmer-labour-party-brexit-london-tony-blair/

Content Provider ironises on the commercial viability of writing topical material at a time of political upheaval; and it is certainly arguable that the three-year machinations following the Brexit vote – the theatrics of its negotiations and brinkmanship, with its shifting ascendancies and allegiances – constituted something novel in the panorama of British politics, culminating in the murder of an MP, the prorogation of parliament and the 2019 general election. “How did the British become so excitable?”, asked Tunku Varadarajan in The Wall Street Journal , remarking “how untethered from its age-old traits of stability, continuity and moderation the country has come to be”. 1 And yet how distant does this national melodrama now appear? It is perhaps not only the relentlessness of the news cycle that has shifted perspectives on Brexit and the ways in which its stalling absorbed and further polarised the country. The Covid-19 pandemic, which began its sweep across the globe days after Brexit became a legal reality, inherited its mantle of political instability and threw into even sharper relief its more paltry and parochial tones. Though Brexit and Covid-19 are discrete and very different phenomena, their temporal contiguity 2 has allowed for their conflation at the national level, for the disruptions occasioned by one to be expediently attributed to the other, 3 even for a certain continuity in political and cultural self-positioning to be outlined. 4 If it took two general elections and three prime ministers to “get Brexit done”, and will take longer to “make Brexit work”, 5 the Covid-19 pandemic appears further still from resolution: as new variants emerge and immune responses are primed, cabinets are reshuffled and ministers and spokespersons made to resign. The speculative nature of the remarks that follow thus reflects the unfolding nature of the crisis from which they issue.

• 6 “To speak of the relentless and ubiquitous economization of all features of life by neoliberalism i (...)

2 One of the continuities that may be established between Brexit and Covid-19 in the British political landscape is in the grounds both crises provide for interrogating how the country sees itself, from within and in relation to the rest of the world: opportunities of self-apperception that can be productively illuminated by notions of utopia and dystopia. It is often pointed out that Thomas More’s utopian thought emerged in response to the society in which he lived, that “The ‘I’ of the work”, as Stephen Greenblatt puts it, “is a man tied in a hundred ways to his particular time and place” (2012, 33). Of course, the imagined existence of the utopian serves also as an act of contestation: it may function “as a reproach to a corrupt social order, it may signal the limitations of the usual accommodation to power and property, it may expose the process whereby the established order of things lays claim to reality itself and denies the possibility of alternatives” (Greenblatt 2012, 54). By that same token, its dystopian obverse is equally anchored in circumstantial reality, both imaginary places that “exist tantalisingly (or frighteningly) on the edge of possibility, somewhere just beyond the boundary of the real” (Kumar 1991, 1). Such is the proximity of the two concepts that many scholars have pointed out the porosity of boundaries between them, most commonly in the admonishment that every utopia, tending towards the totalitarian, is one step removed from dystopia. But dystopia is also not without its utopian possibilities, such that cultural depictions of dystopia, as Mark Fisher has observed, may be “exercises in such acts of imagination – the disasters they depicted acting as narrative pretext for the emergence of different ways of living” (2009, 2). This essay explores the relationship between Covid and culture, questioning the ways in which representations grouped under the broad umbrella of the dystopian have shaped the understanding of and response to the crisis, and then probing the political implications of the dystopian imaginary, used primarily as a lens onto a specific political culture and its “dystopian” denial of the possibility of alternatives. Indeed, contextualising the British government’s handling of the pandemic within a decade of Conservative governance, the essay frames Covid-19 as a crisis in and of neoliberalism; in so doing, it follows Wendy Brown in considering neoliberalism as a “governing rationality”, a cultural architecture or regime, rather than simply a stage of capitalism or set of policies. 6 Its final sections trace the cultural import of this form of politics, reflecting on the work we ask of culture in a time of crisis and the political uses of dystopia therein. The essay thus works with three meanings of “culture”: cultural products or objects that help us understand or decrypt reality; the idea of a dominant political culture, which in turn weaponises “culture” for political capital; and culture in the Gramscian sense in which a society propagates its norms and values.

Pandemic Fictions

3 Why speak of the Covid-19 pandemic in terms of dystopia? It is a concept used abundantly and often hazily, acting as shorthand for several things: the repression and tyranny of government, totalitarianism, censorship and surveillance, great suffering and injustice, existential threat and the post-apocalyptic. The disagreement that Ruth Levitas points out “about the boundaries of utopia, not just as regards the line between the literary and the political but on the inclusion or exclusion of satires and dystopias” (Levitas 2010, 13) is just as applicable to dystopia itself. In its malleability, which certainly partly accounts for its popularity, the concept captures something pervasive about our contemporary condition, perceived in relation to a future that has exacerbated and normalised its more harrowing aspects. Rather than offer a prescriptive definition, I use dystopia here precisely as a loose category – as a genre, type of thought or broad cultural imaginary, which differs from the anti-utopian, conceived as a criticism of utopian thought per se, but blurs the distinction between the dystopian and post-apocalyptic – to probe how these tropes, also by virtue of their ubiquity, have helped conceptualise the Covid-19 crisis.

• 7 https://covid-19archive.org/s/archive/item/14733 , https://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2020/03/2 (...)
• 8 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/04/business/media/coronavirus-contagion-movie.html ; https://www.ins (...)

9 https://www.vulture.com/2020/04/best-pandemic-movies-on-netflix-hulu-prime-and-more.html

• 10 https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/mar/05/publishers-report-sales-boom-in-novels-about-fictiona (...)

4 In its early stages, Covid-19 posed a representational problem for a society saturated by images. The metaphors and analogies at hand, those most readily available to us, were those provided by culture: fictions in the sense of feigning or creating with the imagination. When the UK entered lockdown on March 26 th , 2020, BBC News described its opening footage of empty streets as “the sort of scene imagined by science fiction writers after an apocalyptic disaster”. There is an inherent difficulty in portraying, beyond graphs and statistics, the invisible spread of an invisible pathogen; compounded with the very visceral nature of the pathogen’s effects – the asphyxiation of its victims in congested emergency wards – the emptiness of public space could function well as a negative image, the silent aftermath of an absent catastrophe. This expressive emptiness, suitable for the evening news, was at once strange and familiar, encountered in dystopian and disaster films, scenarios of apocalypse and invasion, science fictions. And can we not see the mechanisms of repetition in the panic buying that prepared for lockdown, causing global shortages of goods? This was a chain of thought visited before in one form or another, and dystopia provided a lexicon with which to decipher and speak, however tentatively, the new reality in which we found ourselves. Inviting us to “laugh away the apocalypse”, memes drew on popular dystopias like The Walking Dead, I Am Legend and The Hunger Games . 7 In the earliest days of lockdown, Steven Soderbergh’s 2011 thriller Contagion jumped from being 270 th to second most viewed film in the Warner Brothers catalogue (unable to unseat only Harry Potter ) , 8 and content provider Vulture compiled a listicle of the “79 Best Pandemic Movies to Binge in Quarantine”. 9 Sales of Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year , Camus’s La Peste and Dean Koontz’s The Eyes of Darkness , a novel published in 1981 about the outbreak of a virus named “Wuhan-400”, rose exponentially. 10 Faced with the unknown, a culturally-shaped imaginative disposition anchored our perception of the thing itself.

11 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-britain-johnson-te-idCAKCN2290ZT

• 12 See Hall et al. (2013) on the “Law-and-order” galvanisation of anxieties around “the mugger” and ho (...)

13 https://0-www-ft-com.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/content/a28a70ca-e971-4741-a6cd-277e48115330

• 14 See Richard Evans’s review in the New Statesman : https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2014/11/one-m (...)

5 This representation by proxy carried over into the language of government, particularly visible in the role played by metaphor in narrativising the crisis. Four days before announcing lockdown, and two weeks after boasting about shaking hands with coronavirus patients during a hospital visit, Boris Johnson promised to “turn the tide of coronavirus in 12 weeks”. He would later liken the virus to “a physical assailant, an unexpected and invisible mugger”, heralding “the moment when we have begun together to wrestle it to the floor […] the moment when we can press home our advantage”. 11 This language suggests a Manichean struggle between opposing forces, attributing anthropomorphic agency to the virus; its infantilising and periphrastic nature reflects an impasse that is surely also linguistic, relying on terms that are codified and easily recognisable (the latter example reaching back to a moral panic around an often racialised crime “epidemic” of the 1970s). 12 Though by no means limited to the British response, martial metaphors, which work in similar ways, appealed also as a result of the paradigmatic role that the Second World War, and the Blitz in particular, has played in national self-fashioning: a rhetoric that marries an encroaching existential threat from without with an exemplary display of stoicism and resilience. As a referent it is unequivocal, both just and morally uncomplicated, evoking a threat at once levelling and unifying; to muster such spirit, Johnson spoke of a “fight […] in which every one of us is directly enlisted”. In its versatility, metaphor is especially apt here, serving ostensibly to facilitate understanding, while being constitutively unencumbered from the literally true. As Susan Sontag writes, “[a]buse of the military metaphor may be inevitable in a capitalist society, a society that increasingly restricts the scope and credibility of appeals to ethical principle, in which it is thought foolish not to subject one’s actions to the calculus of self ‐ interest and profitability” (Sontag 1989, 99). As none propounding these metaphors are old enough to have lived through these experiences, it is to cultural mythography, again, that they inevitably point. When, for large sections of the press, Covid-19 was to be “Boris Johnson’s Churchill moment”, 13 more than to a historical reality, the return is to cosplay and caricature – with turgid Churchillian tribute, Darkest Hour (2017), for example, still fresh in minds – by a prime minister whose own biography of Churchill has been characterised as “‘One man who made history’ by another who seems just to make it up”. 14

• 15 https://www.lbc.co.uk/news/matt-hancock-tells-lbc-how-film-contagion-alerted-him-to-global-vaccine- (...)
• 16 https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2020/04/17/master-of-spin-uk-health-secretary-delivers-covid-19-bat (...)

17 https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2021/07/ghost-ayn-rand-lives-conservatives-covid-19-policy

18 https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-do-tories-love-ayn-rand-

6 Cultural signifiers shaped the optics and pragmatics of the government’s response. Speaking to LBC , former health secretary Matt Hancock stated that Contagion informed his planning of the vaccine rollout, which alerted him to the “huge row” over the provision of doses after the invention of a serum. 15 Though culture can, of course, bring home realities that might otherwise leave us cold, more than the anodyne insight provided by the film itself, of interest here is the comment’s public-facing nature and how it speaks to the curation of an “ordinary” or relatable persona, of a minister who tempers deference to experts with the enjoyment of a popular thriller. As a background for his remote interviews and addresses, Hancock often chose to appear beside a large Damien Hirst portrait of the Queen donated to the government in 2015. If cultural inclinations have long been the cornerstone of our (consumer) identities, the new perspective afforded by the virtual on domesticity and interiors, and the attendant “culture war” around the prominence therein of the Union Jack (of which the Hirst, perhaps, is a close artistic correlative), 16 reflected the idea that cultural products should manifest, with staid literality, one’s values and identity, almost as an outgrowth of one’s politics. Culture’s functioning as political signpost also marked Hancock’s replacement, Sajid Javid, whose signalled admiration for Ayn Rand – the American novelist and founder of Objectivism, best remembered for her 1957 work of dystopian fiction Atlas Shrugged and 1942’s The Fountainhead – was scrutinised for clues about changes in the handling of the public health crisis, 17 and the direction of the NHS. “It’s about the power of the individual,” Javid praised The Fountainhead in an interview with The Spectator , “[a]bout sticking to your beliefs, against popular opinion. Being that individual that really believes in something and goes for it”. 18 One of the novel’s crucial junctures is a courtroom apologia of the individual by its maverick hero, architect Howard Roark:

“From the beginning of history, the two antagonists have stood face to face: the creator and the second-hander. When the first creator invented the wheel, the first second-hander responded. He invented altruism.

“The creator—denied, opposed, persecuted, exploited—went on, moved forward and carried all humanity along on his energy. The second-hander contributed nothing to the process except the impediments. The contest has another name: the individual against the collective. […] I am not an altruist. I do not contribute gifts of this nature […] This is the second-hander’s credo now swallowing the world.

“I came here to say that I do not recognize anyone’s right to one minute of my life. Nor to any part of my energy. Nor to any achievement of mine. No matter who makes the claim, how large their number or how great their need.

“I wished to come here and say that I am a man who does not exist for others.

“It had to be said. The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing. […] I wished to come here and state my terms. I do not care to exist on any others.

“I recognize no obligations toward men except one: to respect their freedom and to take no part in a slave society” (1993, 682-5).

• 19 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/dec/07/public-nhs-the-new-health-and-care-bill-alarm (...)

The appeal of the radical libertarianism of Rand’s Objectivism – described by the scholar of dystopia Gregory Claeys as a “philosophy of extreme egoism”, where “All groups crush the individual, and only egotism and cooperation based solely upon self-interest can ever be justified” (Claeys 2017, 346) – appears dispiritingly direct here, a kind of cultural determinism, for a health secretary who served as business secretary and senior advisor on JP Morgan’s advisory council, and was a managing director at Deutsche Bank during the 2008 financial crisis. After contracting and recovering from Covid-19, Javid tweeted that it was time to stop “cowering” to the virus, signalling a laissez-faire change of tack that would eventually lead to the repealing of all regulations and mandated self-isolation. On his watch, the Health and Care Bill, which alters the NHS in favour of private companies and eases the way to privatisation, has passed its second reading in the House of Commons. 19

Britannia Unchained

20 https://www.wired.com/story/dystopia-tips-prepare-fight-back/

• 21 https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-police-turning-parts-of-uk-into-dystopia-after-prosecuting-p (...)
• 22 https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10301321/Tory-MP-accuses-PM-creating-miserable-dystopia-Co (...)
• 23 “Democracy has crumbled under zero Covid, with parliaments shut for months under health orders. The (...)
• 24 https://www.wptv.com/news/political/gov-ron-desantis-rejects-mandates-faucian-dystopia-amid-covid-1 (...)
• 25 2016’s Exercise Cygnus found the UK to be unprepared for an influenza pandemic: https://www.theguar (...)

7 If dystopia figured as a predominantly aesthetic category in the early stages of the pandemic – with images of tides and wars, invasion and apocalypse – it was soon evoked in an overtly political sense. 20 Indeed, if the virus may be portrayed as an act of God or aberration, an embodiment of pure contingency, the response to it is inevitably political, as police tactics to enforce lockdown measures, for example, were accused of forging “a dystopian sense of society”. 21 The United Kingdom, a country with an eighty-seat Conservative majority, was described by a member of that majority as “a public health socialist state”, while another accused Johnson of “creating a miserable dystopia”. 22 Writing in The Telegraph of Australia’s far more stringent restrictions and border policy, author Megan Goldin lamented that “Zero-Covid has transformed Melbourne into a RoboCop-style dystopia”, enumerating the “alarming similarities with the totalitarian regime from Nineteen Eighty-Four”. 23 In the United States, the Republican governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, spoke out against “a Faucian dystopia in which we’re governed by the whims of bureaucratic authorities who care little for our freedom, little for our aspirations and little for our happiness. No more. We can’t let it happen going forward”. 24 Dystopia here means excessive interference of government, in a populist pitting of the treacherous coercions of out-of-touch elites against the quintessentially American pursuits of “freedom”, “aspirations” and “happiness”. The hyperbole of a politics with which one disagrees, dystopia in these examples is a largely contentless category, a rallying cry to signal the end of debate. For how can one reform dystopia? It calls instead for the resistance of the heroic individual. But these evocations of dystopia advance a very narrow view of freedom, one which misses the collective nature of responsibility and elides how connected we all are in epidemiological terms. Indeed, although the prophylaxis with which we now face daily life – masks, disinfectant, vaccination attested by QR code – and the way in which this has been so rapidly normalised might have the trappings of a new dystopia, I would argue that it is not in the restrictions imposed across the globe, implemented as a last resort to curb the propagation of the coronavirus due to inadequate planning and failure to act on those plans, 25 that the dystopian nature of the Covid-19 pandemic lies, but rather in the ruthlessness of the political culture of neoliberalism that it has further exposed.

26 https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2017/nov/austerity-linked-120000-extra-deaths-england

• 27 https://news.sky.com/story/covid-19-more-than-20-000-lives-could-have-been-saved-if-first-lockdown- (...)
• 28 https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/apr/26/pressure-mounts-on-boris-johnson-over-alleged-let- (...)

29 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jul/18/clinically-vulnerable-people-ministers-covid

8 Specifically, the relationship between dystopia and Covid-19 might be usefully construed here as a lens through which to consider the British government’s egregious mishandling of the pandemic, and the continuity of this response, for all of Covid-19’s exceptionality, with the politics of the decade that precedes it. We might, that is, see the failures of this response as a failure of the neoliberal state, with the comparatively high death tolls of countries like the United Kingdom and the United States an indictment of Anglo-American capitalism. One way to understand the mismanagement of the pandemic, in other words, is as the conclusive act of a decade of cuts and systematic and ideological underfunding of public services: a period of austerity which a study in the British Medical Journal has linked to 120,000 extra deaths in England. 26 Emblematic, in this sense, is the role of “herd immunity” in the government’s initial pandemic response, a policy whose planning and support betrayed a form of epidemiological exceptionalism, and implied an effective culling of those considered medically compromised or whose deaths could be considered “collateral”. Although the policy was abandoned and then, with its echoes of the language of eugenics, entirely disavowed, the temporising before calling for a lockdown is estimated to have cost more than 20,000 lives. 27 The unpredictable and volatile nature of the events of February and March 2020, with which the government has sought to mitigate its failings, no longer held by that winter, and the delaying of the second and third lockdowns – with the alleged resolve to “let the bodies pile up in their thousands” 28 rather than close down the economy again – gave the UK the world’s highest death rate in the month of January 2021. This ethos has repeatedly re-emerged, in the rhetoric of “Freedom Day”, for example, the aptly named dropping of all restrictions in July 2021; and there has been an overarching failure to adequately protect the vulnerable, with those at risk invited to consider shopping at a “quieter time of day”, 29 statutory sick pay stuck, among the lowest in Europe, at £96 per week, and those affected by long forms of the disease struggling to receive adequate medical care. In England, the rate of avoidable mortality was four times higher for those living in deprived areas, with a mortality risk that was higher still for those from ethnic minorities.

• 30 https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/10/opinion/boris-johnson-britain-bills.html https://www.theguardian (...)

9 The idea these facts might simply reflect libertarianism at work, a shrinking of government, is belied by concurrent shows of authoritarianism, as Covid-19 legislation was invoked to violently disrupt a peaceful vigil marking the kidnap, rape and murder of Sarah Everard at the hands of a police officer, or in a Policing Bill that prohibits public demonstration that causes nuisance or annoyance, or the Nationality and Borders Bill, which strengthens the government’s powers to strip millions of British citizens of their citizenship. 30 Though the erosions of political freedoms and escalation of nativist rhetoric and policy were abetted by the state of exception provided by the pandemic, the case could be made – judging by the Conservative’s record on Windrush, the hostile environment and criminalisation of asylum seeking, the cutting of disability benefits, and clamping down on protests – that it has simply expedited advancement on the intended trajectory. In “State and Civil Society”, Antonio Gramsci writes:

The crisis creates situations which are dangerous in the short run, since the various strata of the population are not all capable of orienting themselves equally swiftly, or of reorganizing with the same rhythm. The traditional ruling class, which has numerous trained cadres, changes men and programmes and, with greater speed than is achieved by subordinate classes, reabsorbs the control that was slipping from its grasp. Perhaps it may make sacrifices, and expose itself to an uncertain future by demagogic promises; but it retains power, reinforces it for the time being, and uses it to crush its adversary and disperse his leading cadres, who cannot be very numerous or highly trained. (1971, 210-11)

• 31 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/oct/26/uk-government-u-turns-on-sewage-after-tory-mps- (...)

Brexit and Covid-19 have provided opportunities for personnel changes in the ruling class, for internecine renegotiations of power; in many respects however, despite the spending required to face the pandemic and roll out the furlough scheme and then a vaccine, the handling of the crisis has been a coronation of the status quo. In recent months, the government has voted against providing free school meals before being forced into a U-Turn by footballer Marcus Rashford, voted to repeal a £20 uplift in Universal Credit, and voted to dump raw sewage into Britain’s rivers and waterways. 31 That Johnson’s cabinet should include four of the five authors of 2012’s Britannia Unchained – Truss, Raab, Patel, Kwarteng and Skidmore – is no accident. Written in the throes of austerity, the book offers a dystopian blueprint for Britain, castigating British workers as “among the worst idlers in the world. We work among the lowest hours, we retire early and our productivity is poor. Whereas Indian children aspire to be doctors or businessmen, the British are more interested in football and pop music” (2012, 61), and countering the country’s “bloated state, high taxes and excessive regulation” with neoliberal prescriptions.

• 32 See Mirowski (2013) on how “zombie neoliberalism” “rose from the dead” after the “financial apocaly (...)

33 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-56319927

• 34 https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/ministers-write-off-9-billion-on-lost-unusable-or-overpriced-ppe (...)
• 35 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/11/covid-test-kit-supplier-joked-matt-hancock-whatsapp-n (...)

36 https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/420-per-visor-the-price-of-ministers-ppe-panic-08m26r3pl

• 37 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/dec/06/at-least-46-vip-lane-ppe-deals-awarded-before-formal- (...)
• 38 https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/politics/seven-week-old-firm-with-links-to-tory-peer-lands-122-mi (...)

10 Proper to the neoliberal statecraft that characterised the pandemic response is the alacrity with which crisis has been turned into opportunity. 32 Rather than an ideological unwillingness to spend, it has revealed in whose interests the government is willing to do so. We have seen the conferment to private-sector companies with no public health expertise of lucrative contracts, a distribution of profit among friends, allies and donors. 33 In total, about £10 billion has been spent on unusable, overpriced or expired PPE (Personal protective equipment). 34 Euphemisms like “chumocracy” and “sleaze” fail to depict the deficit of democracy on which these practices are based; indeed, for all the fetishisation of the free market, this procurement bespeaks not ruthless liberalism but corruption, with the health secretary joking about having “never heard of” a former neighbour who, with no prior experience in medical supplies, received a contract to produce test tubes, at least 8 million of which had to be recalled. 35 In another exemplary case, as Gabriel Pogrund reported in The Sunday Times , “[a] former Conservative councillor received a £120 million government contract for face shields whose quality is so doubtful that fewer than 1 in 400 have been used, meaning each one has so far cost the equivalent of £423”. 36 The justification for the lack of tender – that corners needed cutting in order to save lives – was neither legal 37 nor credible: the business in question had recorded heavy losses in recent years, while another did not exist seven weeks prior to it being awarded a £122 million PPE contract. 38 What is presented as the exception in fact reveals the norm: the pandemic has provided an opportunity to body out the “total bureaucratization” described by David Graeber as a process of “fusion of public and private power into a single entity, rife with rules and regulations whose ultimate purpose is to extract wealth in the form of profits” (2015, 17). As Graeber points out, total deregulation conversely leads to a multiplication of red tape, aptly illustrated by the post-Brexit reality of the phantasm of “taking back control”. There is no better example here than the Test and Trace infrastructure, which was outsourced to the private sector – Serco received almost £50 million per month from the Department of Health, at a total cost of over £37 billion – and which according to the spending watchdog “failed its main objective”, to reduce Covid transmission.

• 39 https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/dark-money-investigations/revealed-sloppy-whitehall-departments-sp (...)
• 40 https://0-www-ft-com.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/content/3cc76ad4-4d75-4e07-9f6d-476611fbb28f ; see also: https://www.nytimes.com/ (...)
• 41 https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/industries/public%20and%20social%20sector/our%20insights/ (...)

42 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-britain-vouchers-idUKKBN27F1IR

43 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/17/world/europe/uk-contact-tracing-coronavirus.html

44 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/15/nhs-coping-doctors-patients-omicron

11 With failures so momentous and documented, perhaps the most crucial pandemic fiction was that told to the public. Besides contracting to companies like Serco, Deloitte and Palantir, the government enlisted the aid of corporate storytelling, paying out millions to consultancy firms. 39 What can these sums of money buy? McKinsey & Company, for example, counselled on the “vision, purpose and narrative” of a new public health authority after the scrapping of Public Health England for its handling of the pandemic. 40 McKinsey’s prospectus entitled Rethinking Resilience : Ten Priorities for Governments , which explains that “Due to the pandemic, governments are under increased pressure to act quickly and at scale. By reimagining how they work, they can create resilient societies and public services for the next normal”, singles out key objectives: “Shaping more resilient societies. Building more resilient governments. Revitalizing the core capabilities of the public sector”. To achieve this “resilience”, governments should “Manage sovereign balance sheets with an investor mindset” and “Foster new forms of partnership with the private sector”, use automation to “strengthen public-service productivity”, “Unleash a learning revolution” and “reimagine healthcare”: effectively, run a country as if it were a corporation, increase outsourcing, redundancies and precarity, boost remote learning and restrict access to doctors, by “Encouraging telehealth as the default initial treatment option”. 41 Considering the limitless disruptive optimisation that Rethinking Resilience promises , and the reliance of embattled governments on this “reimagining”, “revitalising” and “rethinking” during the pandemic, one realises t hat it is in fact immaterial that the provision of this alliterative bounty delivers very little of a tangible nature. Even more important here than a roadmap for chipping away at the last vestiges of social democracy is that a fictionalised narrative of crisis management may take the place of actual crisis management, that a “vision, purpose and narrative” may unbridle from the concrete, the compassionate, the factual. In this fictive pandemic, discharging elderly patients from hospitals into care homes without prior testing becomes “throwing a protective shield” around care homes; the “Eat Out To Help Out” scheme, launched to encourage diners back into restaurants in summer 2020, leads to no rises in Covid infections; 42 “herd immunity” was never government strategy; Britain’s Test and Trace infrastructure is “world-beating”, 43 and the unlawful attribution of government contracts is the establishment of a “VIP lane”. In short, in the confection of this alternative version of events, the government, in Johnson’s words, “did everything we could”. The reality on which these falsehoods are grafted is ever-shifting, such that each U-turn or contradiction is motivated by the “changing” of “the science”, and gravity is gauged by the nebulous parameter of the degree to which the NHS is “overwhelmed”. 44 Shifting the onus of care, it is no longer the health service that is expected to provide adequate care for the populace, but the populace that is called upon to “protect” a decimated NHS.

12 In “On Lying in Politics”, Hannah Arendt observes:

The historian knows how vulnerable is the whole texture of facts in which we spend our daily life; it is always in danger of being perforated by single lies or torn to shreds by the organized lying of groups, nations, or classes, or denied and distorted, often carefully covered up by reams of falsehoods or simply allowed to fall into oblivion.

• 45 I am thinking, for example, of journalists like Lewis Goodall and Owen Jones, Gabriel Pogrund in Th (...)
• 46 “The strategy of the British government in minimising the impact” of Covid, ITV’s Robert Peston wro (...)
• 47 When details of Dominic Cummings’s trip to Barnard Castle emerged, the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg tweet (...)
• 48 https://twitter.com/bbclaurak/status/1455863537394405379?s=20 See also Jayne Merrick of the i , who (...)

49 https://www.mediareform.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Who-Owns-the-UK-Media_final2.pdf

• 50 https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/jul/23/evening-standard-and-independent-unable-to-rebut-conc (...)
• 51 https://www.newstatesman.com/author/bae-systems , https://www.newstatesman.com/wp-content/uploads/si (...)
• 52 To provide just a few examples, the prime minister’s father, Stanley Johnson, was invited as a gues (...)
• 53 https://www.itv.com/news/2021-12-07/no-10-staff-joke-in-leaked-recording-about-christmas-party-they (...)
• 54 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLcpcytUnWU In 2014, Marr launched his novel Head of State at 10 Do (...)

“Under normal circumstances”, Arendt writes, “the liar is defeated by reality, for which there is no substitute; no matter how large the tissue of falsehood that an experienced liar has to offer, it will never be large enough” (Arendt 1972, 6-7). The speaking of mendacities into “truth” – the repeating of misinformation to the point that it becomes widely accredited – is a stalwart of contemporary political discourse. As the spectacle of politics comes to replace politics itself, this perversion of the speech act has increasingly debased the public sphere. In the choreographies of the daily media round, ministers and MPs bloviate, repeat mantras and non-sequiturs, a “word-mongering” (John Berger’s phrase) that performs loyalty for the purpose of self-advancement. It is important to ask how this pandemic fiction has been promoted by a media which, with several notable exceptions, 45 has often failed to adequately hold the government to account. Consider the manufacturing of consent around “herd immunity”, 46 when the majority of the scientific community, the WHO, and foreign outlets from La Repubblica to The New York Times counselled against it; the portrayal of governmental breaches of lockdown rules as “within guidelines”; 47 or the dismissal of Conservative MP Owen Paterson’s 30-day suspension for lobbying for private companies, including contracts to Covid test provider Randox worth £500 million, as “a proper Westminster village story”. 48 Dystopian fictions accustom us to look to the press as a bellwether of tyranny. “In the totalitarian East there is political censorship, and the media of mass communication are controlled by the State”, reads Huxley’s Brave New World Revisited . “In the democratic West there is economic censorship and the media of mass communication are controlled by members of the Power Elite” (1965, 35). Though references to “the Power Elite” have aged poorly in the age of populist politics – where the war on “elites” is often fabricated and amplified by those who hold power – the pandemic has shed light on the power structures and ownership models that underpin British media. With three quarters of British newspapers owned by Conservative-backing millionaires or billionaires, 49 others part-owned by foreign states, 50 nominally oppositional outlets teaming up with BAE Systems, 51 and the BBC forced to genuflect to the government under constant threat of revocation of the licence fee, 52 this makes for an obsequious and homogeneous media landscape, one which shares physical proximity and very porous boundaries with the nerve centres of politics. Should it be utopian that the Director-General of the state broadcaster not have previously served as deputy chairman of a branch of the Conservative party? Or that an appointee to the BBC’s board, to arbitrate on “impartiality”, should not have served as Director of Communications for Theresa May, from whom he received a knighthood? Illustrative, among many, are the professional arcs of Boris Johnson, who began his career as a journalist before being sacked for fabricating quotes, and Allegra Stratton, who went from BBC to ITV, to spokesperson for Rishi Sunak and then Boris Johnson; when Stratton was made to resign for a rule-breaking Downing Street “fictional party”, 53 she was defended in the pages of The Spectator by its political editor, James Forsyth, who is Stratton’s husband and Sunak’s best friend. This is not to put forward a view of the media based on self-censorship but rather, as Noam Chomsky once told Andrew Marr, on self-perpetuation: “I don’t say you’re self-censoring. I’m sure you believe everything you’re saying. But what I’m saying is that if you believed something different you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.” 54

• 55 https://www.vice.com/en/article/aekd5j/the-rise-and-fall-of-boring-dystopia-the-anti-facebook-faceb (...)

13 Why characterise this, though, as a “neoliberal dystopia”? By and large, mainstream culture has ceased to portray capitalism – particularly work under capitalism – as dystopian, in a way that might have been more prevalent in 19 th and early-20 th century works, from Marx and Dickens to Chaplin and Fritz Lang, with critical portrayals of automation, industrialisation and the alienation of the production line. One reason, to take each term at a time, is an expedient one. As mentioned above, it has been easy to displace onto Covid the blame for government failings; to speak of the state’s response as blandly dystopian, incentivising degradation, is one way of underlining its continuity. The characteristics of the modus operandi I have been describing – serving the interests of the wealthy, deregulating, increasing inequality, debt and reliance on charities and food banks, widening the gap between state and private resources (in healthcare, for example, and education), eroding the social safety net and the power of organised labour, advocating technocratic solutions and flattening political dissent – are all tenets of neoliberalism, which was conceived, as David Harvey has argued, as a project to restore class power in the wake of the economic and social turmoil of the seventies and post-war social democratic advances. “For those left or cast outside the market system,” Harvey writes, “there is little to be expected from neoliberalization except poverty, hunger, disease, and despair” (2007, 185). It was Mark Fisher who coined the phrase “boring dystopia”, to denote the “bland, mildly coercive signs that abound in late-stage capitalist society, which foster a vague sense of isolation or unease”. This is a normative sort of dystopia, which does not brandish its totalitarian or repressive impulses as a badge of honour, but depends on the passive or acquiescent consent of those more inured and desensitised to its depredations. In some sense, the very premise of the gig economy, and the way its labour model – based on outsourcing, zero-hour contracts and the pitting of monadic self-employed “entrepreneurs” against one another – is sweeping through society, has dystopian traits. As well as locating the pandemic response within a context and political culture, in its semantic hollowing out “dystopia” reflects something of the depletion of our “resources for caring” under neoliberalism, 55 and harnesses the term precisely for its apparently excessive baggage.

• 56 https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/apr/04/new-labour-leader-keir-starmer-pledges-to-work-wit (...)

57 https://twitter.com/Mark_J_Harper/status/1468235647286747165?s=20&t=c5mWFwiQ00zNMV66GfBumw

• 58 Labelling the government’s 1% pay rise for nurses (an effective wage cut once inflation is factored (...)
• 59 https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2022/01/04/lucy-powell-interview-culture-wars-create-false-div (...)

14 But “dystopia” is useful here also in another sense, one associated with the pervasive lack of discursive alternatives. “People have to have a language to speak about where they are and what other possible futures are available to them”, Stuart Hall says in a 1983 lecture. “These futures may not be real; if you try to concretise them immediately, you may find there is nothing there. But what is there, what is real, is the possibility of being someone else, of being in some other social space from the one in which you have already been placed” (Hall 2016, 205). More than its epidemiological datum, it is the loss of impulses and discourses challenging the status quo that marks the truly dystopian aspect of the Covid-19 crisis. For if a state of mind “is utopian when it is incongruous with the state of reality within which it occurs… that type of orientation which transcends reality and which at the same time breaks the bonds of the existing order” (Mannheim 1979, 173), we might consider a state of mind dystopian when it cleaves to that state of reality so doggedly as to strengthen those very bonds. In this sense, it is damning that the government’s mishandling of the pandemic has gone largely unchallenged by the opposition. The role of culture is integral to the establishment of a shared “common sense”, defining what is considered politically viable or beyond the pale. In this “dystopian” reconfiguration of the real, Covid becomes an issue pertaining to culture rather than public health, and criticism of policy is “playing politics”, a polarised position in a culture war of which Covid-19 is another battlefield. The meaning of “culture” here borders on the anthropological, denoting the often-unspoken assumptions, traditions and leanings that make up and anchor identity, the “place” where the subject is invented. To avoid pursuing “opposition for opposition’s sake”, 56 or running the risk of appearing excessively “ideological”, the Labour party has avoided attempting to shape the discourse – on the mishandling of the pandemic, but also in articulating any sort of alternative vision for the country, on issues of public ownership, immigration and taxation, for example, even opposing a proposed rise in corporation tax. On Covid, as one Conservative MP put it, “Labour have failed in their constitutional duty to hold Govt to account, or ask them any difficult questions”, 57 effectively reducing the difference between the principal parties to trivial details – questions of timing and competence, decency and communication strategy 58 – with a stultifying adherence to a linguistic terrain amenable to government (“I wouldn’t say I’m woke. I’m not woke but I’m not anti-woke either”). 59 The constant deferral to the calculus of power winning elides the fact that a salutary democratic process hinges on the public acknowledgement of such gross failures of the state. Surely one sinister correlative of the broadening of the “tissue of falsehood”, and its lack of a robust counter-narrative, is the proliferation of conspiracy theories during the pandemic. It is a point, often made, that Arendt puts well: “the result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lies will now be accepted as truth, and the truth be defamed as lies, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world […] is being destroyed”, engendering “a peculiar kind of cynicism – an absolute refusal to believe in the truth of anything, no matter how well this truth may be established” (1993, 257). If capitalism thrives under “conspiratorial” conditions, relying on the exclusion of a disengaged populace from knowledge of its workings, the flourishing of conspiracy theories may be seen as the frenzied narrativisation of an alternative, an attempt to ascribe sense – be it often farfetched, bizarre, instrumentalised or racist – where there no longer seems to be one.

Rethink. Reskill. Reboot.

60 https://twitter.com/NadineDorries/status/1482622722228240387?s=20

• 61 https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/coronavirus-government-ad-ballet-dancer-retrain-it-b (...)

15 During the pandemic, the forced closure of cultural venues and arts establishments, and the attendant necessity of government support, has renewed scrutiny on the arts, their value and how they are funded. At a time like this, despite the lip service paid to the excellence of “great British content”, 60 the arts clearly constitute a problem: one tone-deaf government campaign, featuring a ballerina soon to alight on an interest in cyber-security, invited artists to “Rethink. Reskill. Reboot”. 61 “We are asked to define the relation of the arts to economics, we are asked what position the arts hold in the ideal republic,” wrote Ezra Pound in 1913, “And it is obviously the opinion of many people […] that the arts had better not exist at all” ( 1954 , 41). But this was also a moment in which many sought solace in the arts, supporting artists and venues, protesting closures and signing petitions; a moment that made us acutely aware of how imbricated with art our solitude is, how we count on it to compose our selves. The night before lockdown came into effect, I walked down a barren Avenue de la République listening to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ Ghosteen – an experience, in retrospect, I was trying to render aesthetic, casting out for a form that could speak to the portentous and as yet featureless nature of what was happening. “This world is beautiful / Held within its stars / I keep it in my heart.” Cataclysm has long been a source of aesthetic fascination; what work was expected of culture in its throes?

• 62 https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115000538083-Attendee-attention-tracking#:~:text=As%20of% (...)
• 63 https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/migrant-channel-crossings-france-navy-priti-patel-ho (...)

16 I proposed, above, that culture helped shape our early understanding of the pandemic, with certain cultural products singled out to diffract our experiences. Those of us fortunate enough to be able to do our jobs remotely might have drawn analogies between the long days spent online and the “Fifteen Million Merits” episode of Black Mirror , where humanity, confined indoors, inhabits an entirely simulated world; on learning that it was initially equipped with an attendance-tracking function, we might have likened Zoom, the software that aggregated activities from teaching and socialising to yoga classes and funerals, to the Orwellian telescreen that broadcasts as it simultaneously surveils. 62 1984 was evoked paradigmatically, to describe the restrictions and the prurient reporting of their infraction to the authorities tasked with enforcing them. The home office’s proposal to deploy wave machines and warships to stop asylum seekers crossing the Channel conjured Winston’s diary entry for April 4 th , 1984, about “a ship full of refugees being bombed somewhere in the Mediterranean” (Orwell 2000, 10-11). 63 In themselves, these apparently meaningful collisions of fiction and reality are unexceptional. We might think of the flickers of recognition they occasion – whether these originate in Black Mirror or 28 Days Later , The Matrix or La Peste – as a reversal of Freud’s idea of the unheimlich : not as something familiar that has become estranged, uncanny, but rather as something known that softens the real’s disquieting blow. Against the event that makes the familiar unrecognisable – the city centre, for example, emptied of human life – the familiar that makes recognisable the event. But if a work has proven even startlingly prescient, this tells us nothing of its intrinsic value; indeed, this strikes me as a singularly unambitious demand to make of culture.

• 64 https://mediatorsbeyondborders.org/pandemic-poetry-calming-words-in-the-midst-of-chaos/ See also: h (...)
• 65 https://www.npr.org/2021/04/27/991117892/how-poetry-has-helped-to-guide-people-during-the-pandemic? (...)
• 66 https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/dec/11/cosy-cookbooks-and-a-surprise-hit-what-weve-really-re (...)

17 Another expectation of culture is that it should soothe in times of crisis, offering “calming words in the midst of chaos”. 64 An NPR article, entitled “Poetry Provides Comfort — Through The Pandemic And Beyond”, claims poetry “can guide us when it gets difficult to manage the intensity of what we’re feeling”. 65 Besides this provision of emotional containment, or articulation of affects difficult to express, culture’s merit rested in its capacity for evasion. “Books had a real moment,” a publishing director at Viking told The Guardian , “They were immediate, they were accessible. We all wanted to escape into different stories”. 66 Though comprehensible in the circumstances, to reduce culture to comfort is to do it disservice, to make of it another tool of self-care, alongside Pilates or mindfulness, a conception both utilitarian and highly individualised. With bars and stadiums, clubs and concert halls, cinemas and theatres closed, and with the introduction of a curfew restricting movement in several countries to getting to work and back, culture’s “calming” or “caring” effects come to resemble the sedating role of subscription television as the algorithmically tailored nightly evasion of the neoliberal subject. But casting culture as a flight from reality abdicates its sense-making potential, its capacity to produce meaning within the crisis, rather than divert attentions from it. Interviewed by The Guardian , classicist Mary Beard says:

67 https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/sep/19/mary-beard-twelve-caesars-interview The arts make us feel better, people said – and I’m sure they do. But I also think this is a dangerous line to follow. The real reason we needed the arts was because we needed to understand what we were going through. I’m not going to sit here and say, what do we need more: a vaccine or the arts? That’s a false equivalence. But crises are recovered from by people learning about them. What did we feel and why? If we want to look at plagues and pandemics, well, western literature in the form of The Iliad starts with a plague! The arts are essential and that’s what we must fight for. 67 (original emphasis)

• 68 Casting Covid-19 as a vindication of his work, Giorgio Agamben has written of “the invention of an (...)

I share Beard’s qualms with this kind of argument, as well as the conviction that literature can offer insight into our experiences, that the past shapes the future and to forget compels us to repeat. But can The Iliad really accrete our understanding of Covid-19? The arts are not hermeneutics, illuminating the world according to our disciplinary specialism. 68 It is comprehensible that, as we spent countless hours behind screens, atomised and disempowered, the collective experience of culture a void in our lives, many attempted to gauge the size of that void, to prove the value of the arts to ensure their survival. But understandable calls to “lift the lockdown on culture”, before the vaccine roll out, or the establishment of a comprehensive mask and tracing policy, rowed against the fundamental epidemiological datum – that in times of life and death, the arts really are secondary. The dichotomy Beard rejects is not as false as it appears. Perhaps the suggestion that culture is as important as the air we breathe or the food we eat – on étouffe sous nos masques ; culture, nourriture essentielle – always sells us short, groping for a meaningful measure; perhaps the problem stems from the desire to attribute a concrete value to culture, to derive from its “lessons” a cookbook of the future, when it is worth acknowledging the uselessness that accounts for why it is needed. Otherwise, we underwrite a transactional or monetised view of culture as content provision, an idea that every pound that goes in should yield a quantifiable return. Whether it does or not is beside the point; any attempt to quantify the value of arts in our society is to compete on the terms of neoliberalism, with its discourse around how to make the arts more nimble, agile, resilient – codewords, often, for further cuts in funding, opportunities and support.

Against Dystopia

69 https://seattle.bibliocommons.com/list/share/86922331/1613921019

• 70 https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20211207-the-matrix-and-the-sci-fi-stories-that-became-a-realit (...)

71 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/dec/26/the-handmaids-tale-year-trump-misogyny-metoo

72 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2768656

18 If the dystopian enjoyed an already prominent place in contemporary culture, Covid-19 has given it a newfound salience. “Some readers want to escape from their fears,” the Seattle Public library justified its “Contagion: Pandemics in Dystopian Lit” reading list of April 2020, “while others rush headlong into what scares them”. 69 As per the “resonances”, described above, between reality and certain dystopias, the pandemic invigorated the conversation around their timeliness and pertinence. In May 2021, for example, The New York Times published an interview with the Black Mirror creator entitled “Charlie Brooker Saw All This Coming”, while an article in BBC Culture suggested that 1999’s The Matrix “predicted life in 2021”, and a Netflix series was said to have “predicted the pandemic”. 70 In providing a cultural precedent, the value of dystopia appears intrinsically linked to its cautionary function, its ability to “hold up a mirror” to our present and act as “a bleak warning”, as Matthew d’Ancona writes of The Handmaid’s Tale : a “disturbing text for our times” which “did more than a thousand news bulletins to capture all that was most toxic about the new populist right”. 71 In so doing, dystopia furnishes the sort of foresight that, with a moralising view, turns authors into prophets to be heeded, “dystopian fables as prophecies more than fiction”. 72

73 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-59154520

• 74 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/dec/25/worried-about-super-intelligent-machines-they (...)
• 75 https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/nov/05/kanye-west-condemns-metoo-movement-as-nineteen-eighty (...)
• 76 “ By the end of its second episode, I knew that Netflix’s new series ‘Emily in Paris’ was not a ligh (...)

77 https://0-www-theatlantic-com.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/culture/archive/2021/12/teletubbies-reboot-children-tv-shows/621120/

• 78 https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2022/jan/17/dystopia-core-what-is-new-pandemic-era-punk-look-fa (...)

79 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/may/15/future-progress-renaissance-internet-europe

19 I would submit, however, that dystopian culture is no longer as exploratory or oppositional as it might seem. As a concept, clearly, it remains seductive, but its warning function has long been absorbed and commodified by the system it sets out to critique, participating frictionlessly within it. For all but those who seek actively to ignore it, or counsel a patience and moderation that amounts largely to the same thing, the data is there and abundant – on global heating, for example, on inequality, on economic, social, gender-based and racial oppression; we have long been forewarned, in ways more scientific and indisputable than cultural depictions can adduce. In the cultural economy I have been describing, dystopia risks providing little more than gratification of the cultural choices of the concerned consumer. Its innocuousness reflects in the usage of t h e word. Alongside the examples given above, in the past few months alone, the term has been applied to things as diverse as Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse, 73 the rapid development of Artificial Intelligence, 74 the #MeToo movement, 75 the Netflix series Emily in Paris , 76 the Teletubbies , 77 and “dystopia-core” which, alongside “avant apocalypse”, is “the new pandemic-era punk look”. 78 Dystopia is a word that is politically vacuous, emptied out to the degree that it “has now no meaning”, to misquote Orwell, “except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’” (Orwell 2021, 23). Politically, it has long been used to denote what we are not: the repoussoir that intimates that ours is the best of all possible worlds, that all else, with the exemption of our allies and clients, is totalitarian or illiberal. Dystopian is all that didn’t end with the end of history, the residue of the neoliberal settlement. As an idea, it is consolatory: we may not be perfect, but we are not like them . But once the “end of history” triumphalism has ebbed, and we have rested enough on the laurels of never having had it so good, 79 this is what that lack of alternative looks like.

80 See also Berardi (2011) on the “the slow cancellation of the future”.

• 81 https://0-www-ft-com.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/content/a3a53ae8-b1e3-11e8-8d14-6f049d06439c , https://www.statnews.com/2019/01/3 (...)

82 https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/uk-ghost-flights-covid-pandemic-b2021090.html

• 83 https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2021/07/22/uk-government-approves-50percent-funding-cut-for-arts-an (...)

20 The recrudescent interest in dystopia, its evident viability as commercial form, is surely a sign of the times. In my time in the classroom, I have been struck by the popularity, alongside blockbusters and superhero films, of dystopian fictions amongst my students. For those under a certain age, there is perhaps something about the nature of dystopia that speaks to the precarity that has always defined their experience of the world, where it’s easier to imagine the end of the world, in H. Bruce Franklin’s phrase on J. G. Ballard, than the end of capitalism. Without future, there is only catastrophe; 80 “Who wasn’t preparing for the end of the world?”, wonders Dorothy, adjunct professor of English and protagonist of Christine Smallwood’s The Life of the Mind (2021, 217). Haunted by the spectre of environmental collapse, ours is a culture weaned on discourses of its own precarious transience, which demands the daily repression of that knowledge in order to function. Culture, in this, has a curious role, acting as libidinal theatre in which the spectacle plays out. Depictions of apocalyptic eventuation allow us to experience vertigo with the safety guardrail, afford the release of a vicarious participation in our own destruction, while dystopian fictions offer up post-apocalypse without the apocalyptic event. The attraction, with the latter, is in the mundanity of the inevitable. If post-modernism was the culture of late capitalism, perhaps dystopia is the culture most befitting whatever it is we’re living now, this more advanced and deregulated stage of predatory capitalism, where cigarette manufacturer Philip Morris acquires Vectura, a company that makes asthma inhalers; where the Sackler family, owners of Purdue Pharma and global patrons of the arts, after making more than 10 billion in profits from the painkiller OxyContin, move into the “attractive market” of addiction recovery, patenting a drug to treat the epidemic of opioid dependence they have contributed to creating, which has made overdose the primary cause of accidental death in the United States; 81 where nearly fifteen thousand “ghost flights” – passengerless flights operated by commercial airlines – have departed since the beginning of the pandemic. 82 We might question, perhaps, the aesthetic allure to which we are susceptible in contemplating the dystopian, how the distance it necessarily implies may function as a comforting, purgatory one. Culture, in this sense, becomes another instrument in the acceptance that “not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it” (Fisher 2009, 2). For what kinds of culture can such a system produce, as generations enter adulthood with limited prospects or access to home ownership or social housing, and burdened with debt if they wish to go to university? In recent years, funding for arts and design courses – including art, music, dance, design, drama, media studies and journalism – has been halved, as humanities and social science departments face a wave of closures. 83 Stewart Lee has pointed out the hypocrisy underlying the official celebrations to mark the fortieth anniversary of punk by a government that had contributed more than any other to eradicating the material conditions for such subcultures to emerge, for an art able to imagine alternatives.

• 84 “Obscene. That is the word, a word of contested etymology, that she must hold on to as a talisman. (...)
• 85 The mass death event induces an epiphany in the Conservative-voting, business-owning male protagoni (...)

86 https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2021/oct/24/david-hare-furious-bbc-rejection-of-covid-play

21 As Fisher writes, “The very oppressive pervasiveness of capitalist realism means that even glimmers of alternative political and economic possibilities can have a disproportionately great effect”, and “[f]rom a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again” (2009, 80-81). Whatever the origin theory that will eventually become the most accredited, it is inarguable that Covid-19 is a product of our economic system, and perhaps its sole hopeful outcome is that it should constitute one such breach in it. One of the contested etymologies of the word “obscene” is from the Latin ob+scenus , “off stage”, where for the Greek dramatists violence occurred. 84 For a spell, Covid brought on-stage the violence of our social pact otherwise hidden from view, just far enough away – “beyond the boundary”, like dystopia or climate breakdown – to still dismiss or ignore. Breaching the sightlessness that capitalism exacts, it briefly made “boring dystopia” less boring. It is surely too soon to attempt to appraise how culture may grapple with Covid – will it bring an outpouring of pandemic fictions, spawn its own dystopian subgenre? – but there may yet be something salutary in its representations. Dennis Kelly’s play Together , directed by Stephen Daldry and broadcast on BBC Two in June 2021, was an early example, and there was something cathartic about watching, for the first time, the fictionalisation of painful recent history. But the play shies away from substantial criticism of policy and the plight of the subaltern is little more than foil for the protagonists’ moral principles and self-regard. 85 Interestingly, David Hare has complained that the BBC rejected his play, Beat the Devil , which fictionalises his struggle with coronavirus. “The basic difficulty is that everybody is absolutely convinced that nobody wants to know anything about Covid-19”, he told The Guardian . “If you talk to, for instance, people at the BBC, they will just say: ‘Oh, give me drama on any other subject but Covid – people are not interested in Covid.’ There is absolutely no evidence for this”. 86 Though I have not seen Hare’s play, there is something to this idea of a concerted diversion of attentions away from the traumatic. Pandemic fictions might yet return us to that interrupted affect, with a response that does not sideline necessary grief or indignation or dilute it with irony. Alongside any lessons we learn, this might afford the opportunity for a profounder public acknowledgement of what has been lost and what we owe the dead.

87 https://www.economist.com/britain/2020/03/21/the-virus-means-the-big-state-is-back

22 But as well as the anguish from which we recoil, in our exigency for restoration – of a previous state, the semblance of normality – we shun the potential inherent in recent experience. “Never before had there been a collective decision, however haphazard and uneven, to shut large parts of the world’s economy down,” writes Adam Tooze (2020), who characterises the shutdown as “a moment of collective agency”. Would it be excessive to find in the collective nature of this agency – the bringing into being, on an almost global scale, of something which did not previously exist – a fundamentally creative essence? It is the exceptional nature of this collective response that exposed a vision of the world, as Graeber puts it, as “something that we make, and could just as easily make differently” (2015, 89). The pandemic has spurred reflection on the nature of work, highlighting the necessity of rethinking what is considered “essential” and the inadequacies of how we value it. Andreas Malm (2020) asks what could be achieved if the state-level interventionism of the Covid-19 response were employed to address the climate crisis. The Covid response has refuted a conception of the populace as rational actors unwilling to accept any sort of sacrifice for the collective, and further exposed the interested fallacy behind the idea that, by waiting for it to be economically profitable to do so, while displacing onto individual behaviour the onus to change, the system of production responsible for climate collapse will be ultimately able to tackle it. These insights are particularly relevant at a time when the tenets of Conservative ideology dictate a Hayekian restoration, one which appears at loggerheads with the current moment in which The Economist writes that “The virus means the big state is back” (March 2020) and heralds “The triumph of big government” (November 2021). 87 Already, as a result of Brexit and Covid-19, we are seeing small rises in salaries, with the shortages of goods bringing attention to HGV drivers and the globalised workings of the supply chain.

23 It has not taken long for Covid – a metonym of the virus, of the protracted periods of lockdown, or both – to become something of a floating signifier, associated with global warming and zoonotic spillover or gain-of-function research and laboratory leaks; an interference of the state either warranted or unduly; a strengthening or loosening of the bonds of community; a villainous or heroic pharmaceutical industry; a strange hiatus from the business of living or an augury of mass extinction. In a piece in the Financial Times , Arundhati Roy has written of the pandemic as a “portal”:

Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality”, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality.

Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.

88 https://0-www-ft-com.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/content/10d8f5e8-74eb-11ea-95fe-fcd274e920ca ; https://www.economist.com/leaders/ (...) We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it. 88

• 89 This year, the world’s 2,600-plus billionaires have become $1.6 trillion richer: https://www.forbes (...)
• 90 Aristotle Kallis writes of “a vast and forbidding archipelago of fiercely competing micro-sovereign (...)

Roy’s article was published in April 2020. Since then, the pandemic has made billionaires richer, 89 emboldened authoritarianism and the forces of reaction, 90 and increased the monopolies of tech giants across the globe. That, with few exceptions, like hampering Donald Trump’s re-election, history has disproven Roy’s claim that Covid has made the mighty kneel only amplifies the urgency of her call to action, in a “new normal” that increasingly resembles a heightened state of denial. If the concept of dystopia is to have value therein, I think, this will be found by turning it back, closer to home, to signify the dearth of emancipatory and imaginative alternatives, and their stifling under the sign of the sensible and the always reasonable.

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1 https://www.wsj.com/articles/englishness-review-volcanic-island-11622233044?redirect=amp#click=https://t.co/A5B0lMPuXL (All links were accessed in in January 2022, when this essay was written, and verified in November 2022.) This portrayal of British politics as the domain of “stability” and “moderation” is somewhat reductive: portraying the outcome of the Brexit referendum, and the “dance of dervishes” that followed, as a bolt from the blue disregards how the material effects of the “grown-up” and “sensible” politics of the austerian Cameron-Osborne years fomented support for Brexit, particularly in economically depressed Leave-voting constituencies.

2 The UK left the EU on January 31 st , 2020; the day before, 84-year-old Peter Attwood from Kent became the UK’s first Covid-19 victim (though cause of death would only be recognised some months later).

3 https://edition.cnn.com/2021/09/12/business/brexit-reality-bites-in-britain-intl-gbr-cmd/index.html ; https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/coronavirus-brexit-talks-eu-boris-johnson-a9508856.html

4 For some, global crisis confirmed the hybris of “going it alone”, with the government accused of “putting Brexit over breathing” when the UK opted out of an EU ventilator procurement scheme in March 2020; for others, Britain’s early lead in the vaccine rollout and the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine were a vindication of the Brexit vote and a newfound self-sufficiency, proof of “the vast dispersal of British ideas, and British values, puffed around the world like the seeds of some giant pollinating tree” ( https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-boris-johnson-the-oxford-vaccine-shows-why-we-and-the-world-need-britain-to-be-global ). An LSE blog argues “there are indications that lockdown scepticism is becoming increasingly entwined with the Leave/Remain divide that dominates most aspects of British politics” ( https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/brexit/2020/06/08/20111/ ), a position commonly reflected in the press: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/how-closely-linked-are-lockdown-and-brexit- .

6 “To speak of the relentless and ubiquitous economization of all features of life by neoliberalism is thus not to claim that neoliberalism literally marketizes all spheres, even as such marketization is certainly one important effect of neoliberalism. Rather, the point is that neoliberal rationality disseminates the  model of the market  to all domains and activities—even where money is not at issue—and configures human beings exhaustively as market actors, always, only, and everywhere as  homo oeconomicus ” (Brown 2015, 31).

7 https://covid-19archive.org/s/archive/item/14733 , https://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2020/03/21/laugh-away-the-apocalypse-with-these-15-coronavirus-s/?sh=57abe97b23fc

8 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/04/business/media/coronavirus-contagion-movie.html ; https://www.insider.com/how-contagion-became-a-must-see-movie-during-the-coronavirus-2020-4 .

10 https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/mar/05/publishers-report-sales-boom-in-novels-about-fictional-epidemics-camus-the-plague-dean-koontz

12 See Hall et al. (2013) on the “Law-and-order” galvanisation of anxieties around “the mugger” and how the trope, “with its connotations of race, crime and violence”, became linked to black youth. A Sunday Telegraph article of October 1972, entitled “War on Muggers”, called for police to arrest muggers preventively, “before they go to work” (2013, 44); the following year, the authors write, “the Wandsworth police division was reported as having ‘turned the tide’ on muggers” (2013, 12). See De Waal (2021) for the colonial history and connotations of metaphors concerning the “war on disease”.

14 See Richard Evans’s review in the New Statesman : https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2014/11/one-man-who-made-history-another-who-seems-just-make-it-boris-churchill .

15 https://www.lbc.co.uk/news/matt-hancock-tells-lbc-how-film-contagion-alerted-him-to-global-vaccine-scramble/

16 https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2020/04/17/master-of-spin-uk-health-secretary-delivers-covid-19-battle-plan-in-front-of-damien-hirsts-painting ; https://www.indy100.com/news/flags-union-jack-tories-robert-jenrick-b1819636 .

19 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/dec/07/public-nhs-the-new-health-and-care-bill-alarm-bells-privatisation

21 https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-police-turning-parts-of-uk-into-dystopia-after-prosecuting-people-driving-due-to-boredom-and-shoppers-11965903

22 https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10301321/Tory-MP-accuses-PM-creating-miserable-dystopia-Covid-curbs.html

23 “Democracy has crumbled under zero Covid, with parliaments shut for months under health orders. The twitching curtain brigade, encouraged by government campaigns urging them to inform on their neighbours, watch for rule-breakers and use special hotlines to summon the police. Melbourne police were recently ordered to patrol playgrounds until a public outcry forced a U-turn. In a park near me, children on scooters flee as a police car pulls up. It’s like a scene from RoboCop. Masks are mandatory outdoors even if walking on a windswept beach or a deserted street. Those caught disobeying may be fined, handcuffed, forcibly masked and arrested if they refuse to comply. In another Orwellian twist, health orders banning protests are issued by bureaucrats reporting to the very leaders the protesters are demonstrating against. Protest organisers, including a pregnant woman, have been arrested in their homes and hit with conspiracy charges. Religious worship, even in small groups outdoors, has been banned.” https://archive.fo/Ipfwa#selection-1097.1-1097.67

24 https://www.wptv.com/news/political/gov-ron-desantis-rejects-mandates-faucian-dystopia-amid-covid-19-surge

25 2016’s Exercise Cygnus found the UK to be unprepared for an influenza pandemic: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/22/official-report-exercise-cygnus-uk-was-not-prepared-for-pandemic-is-published

27 https://news.sky.com/story/covid-19-more-than-20-000-lives-could-have-been-saved-if-first-lockdown-was-introduced-a-week-earlier-report-says-12340094

28 https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/apr/26/pressure-mounts-on-boris-johnson-over-alleged-let-the-bodies-pile-high-remarks

30 https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/10/opinion/boris-johnson-britain-bills.html https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/26/nationality-bill-british-citizens-clause-9 https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2021/12/exclusive-british-citizenship-of-six-million-people-could-be-jeopardised-by-home-office-plans

31 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/oct/26/uk-government-u-turns-on-sewage-after-tory-mps-threaten-rebellion

32 See Mirowski (2013) on how “zombie neoliberalism” “rose from the dead” after the “financial apocalypse” of 2008; see also Klein (2007), who recently applied characteristics of the shock doctrine to the exploitation of Covid-19 to build “a high-tech dystopia”: https://theintercept.com/2020/05/08/andrew-cuomo-eric-schmidt-coronavirus-tech-shock-doctrine/ .

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/11/healthcare-firm-advised-by-owen-paterson-won-133m-coronavirus-testing-contract-unopposed

34 https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/ministers-write-off-9-billion-on-lost-unusable-or-overpriced-ppe-262kpdr8v

35 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/11/covid-test-kit-supplier-joked-matt-hancock-whatsapp-never-heard-of-him-alex-bourne?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

37 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/dec/06/at-least-46-vip-lane-ppe-deals-awarded-before-formal-due-diligence-in-place

38 https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/politics/seven-week-old-firm-with-links-to-tory-peer-lands-122-million-ppe-contract-204661/

39 https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/dark-money-investigations/revealed-sloppy-whitehall-departments-spent-56m-on-covid19-consultants/

40 https://0-www-ft-com.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/content/3cc76ad4-4d75-4e07-9f6d-476611fbb28f ; see also: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/22/business/france-mckinsey-consultants-covid-vaccine.html

41 https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/industries/public%20and%20social%20sector/our%20insights/rethinking%20resilience%20ten%20priorities%20for%20governments/rethinking-resilience-ten-priorities-for-governments-vf.pdf

45 I am thinking, for example, of journalists like Lewis Goodall and Owen Jones, Gabriel Pogrund in The Sunday Times and investigative work by the FT and The Guardian . On television, Newsnight and Piers Morgan’s interviews with ministers and MPs on Good Morning Britain were often effective. This essay is indebted to the coverage and analysis provided by Novara Media, in particular TyskySour , hosted by Michael Walker and co-hosted by Ash Sarkar, Dalia Gebrial and Aaron Bastani.

46 “The strategy of the British government in minimising the impact” of Covid, ITV’s Robert Peston wrote, “is to allow the virus to pass through the entire population so that we acquire herd immunity, but at a much delayed speed so that those who suffer the most acute symptoms are able to receive the medical support they need”. https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/Herd-immunity--will-be-vital-to-stopping-coronavirus . The BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg shared a bizarre, bucket-based “punter friendly explanation” of the policy, which was “worth a watch” ( https://twitter.com/bbclaurak/status/1238927668604801025?s=20&t=hHwq1tuqBWeyFkW5IxHIfg) . Among many other examples, see also Andrew Rawnsley: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/15/this-coronavirus-crisis-has-forced-the-retirement-of-pantomime-johnson

47 When details of Dominic Cummings’s trip to Barnard Castle emerged, the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg tweeted: “Source says his trip was within guidelines as Cummings went to stay with his parents so they could help with childcare while he and his wife were ill - they insist no breach of lockdown” ( https://twitter.com/bbclaurak/status/1263914724305055745?s=20 ). Cummings later informed a special committee of MPs that “the main person I spoke to in 2020 was Laura Kuenssberg at the BBC because the BBC has a special position during a crisis… I could give guidance to her on certain very big stories”.

48 https://twitter.com/bbclaurak/status/1455863537394405379?s=20 See also Jayne Merrick of the i , who suggested the real victim was Paterson himself: “Owen Paterson’s lobbying was wrong but if no10/Tory party had left this [parliamentary] standards shenanigans alone he would’ve had his suspension and that would be that. They’ve made it 10x worse, having thrown their arms around him and u-turned. Huge duty of care issue. What a mess.” ( https://twitter.com/janemerrick23/status/1456272153142124554?s=20&t=TNiI-EUHfgSgNzJna3It6w )

50 https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/jul/23/evening-standard-and-independent-unable-to-rebut-concerns-over-saudi-ownership

51 https://www.newstatesman.com/author/bae-systems , https://www.newstatesman.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/files/bae_full_pdf.pdf

52 To provide just a few examples, the prime minister’s father, Stanley Johnson, was invited as a guest on Newsnight to defend his son’s green credentials, and chancellor Rishi Sunak was mocked up in a Superman outfit. The BBC edited out audience laughter during Question Time , when Johnson was asked if it was important to tell the truth, and broadcast footage from 2016, rather than 2019, when he looked dishevelled laying a wreath at the Cenotaph ( https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/boris-johnson-laughing-question-time-video-edited-general-election-a9217141.html ; https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/03/election-coverage-bbc-tories ).

53 https://www.itv.com/news/2021-12-07/no-10-staff-joke-in-leaked-recording-about-christmas-party-they-later-denied

54 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLcpcytUnWU In 2014, Marr launched his novel Head of State at 10 Downing Street as a guest of David Cameron ( https://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/london-life/head-of-state-everything-you-need-to-know-about-andrew-marr-s-new-comic-political-thriller-set-inside-no-10-9698776.html ).

55 https://www.vice.com/en/article/aekd5j/the-rise-and-fall-of-boring-dystopia-the-anti-facebook-facebook-group

56 https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/apr/04/new-labour-leader-keir-starmer-pledges-to-work-with-boris-johnson-on-covid-19

58 Labelling the government’s 1% pay rise for nurses (an effective wage cut once inflation is factored in) as “reprehensible”, Labour countered with a proposed 2.1% rise ( https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/nhs-pay-rise-covid-labour-b1813582.html ). Starmer has reneged on nearly all his leadership “pledges” in favour of focus-grouped politics and relaunches based around “security”, “prosperity” and “respect”, courting corporate donors and whipping his MPs to abstain on the “Spy Cops” bill that offers protection to undercover agents who break the law.

59 https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2022/01/04/lucy-powell-interview-culture-wars-create-false-divide-says/ Linguistic failings have also characterised the possibility for an informed conversation on the efficacy of masks, a term so toxic it has been euphemised as “face coverings”, and to distinguish between those that do and do not filter.

61 https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/coronavirus-government-ad-ballet-dancer-retrain-it-b990923.html Note the similarity with the language of the McKinsey prospectus above.

62 https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115000538083-Attendee-attention-tracking#:~:text=As%20of%20April%202%2C%202020,Yuan . On Zoom and privacy, see also: https://newrepublic.com/article/157553/zoom-colonized-lives

63 https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/migrant-channel-crossings-france-navy-priti-patel-home-secretary-a9660846.html . For further examples of Orwellian foresight, see, amongst others, https://0-www-theatlantic-com.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/magazine/archive/2019/07/1984-george-orwell/590638/ , https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/may/19/legacy-george-orwell-nineteen-eighty-four and Lynskey (2019).

64 https://mediatorsbeyondborders.org/pandemic-poetry-calming-words-in-the-midst-of-chaos/ See also: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2774325

65 https://www.npr.org/2021/04/27/991117892/how-poetry-has-helped-to-guide-people-during-the-pandemic?t=1637691453934 . For six prominent poets on the pandemic, see also: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/may/08/windows-on-the-world-pandemic-poems-by-simon-armitage-hollie-mcnish-kae-tempest-and-more

66 https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/dec/11/cosy-cookbooks-and-a-surprise-hit-what-weve-really-read-in-the-pandemic

67 https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/sep/19/mary-beard-twelve-caesars-interview

68 Casting Covid-19 as a vindication of his work, Giorgio Agamben has written of “the invention of an epidemic”: https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-l-invenzione-di-un-epidemia . An English translation is available at https://www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/articles/coronavirus-and-philosophers/ See responses by, amongst others, Benjamin Bratton: https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/5125-agamben-wtf-or-how-philosophy-failed-the-pandemic and Jean-Luc Nancy: https://antinomie.it/index.php/2020/02/27/eccezione-virale/

70 https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20211207-the-matrix-and-the-sci-fi-stories-that-became-a-reality , https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/tv/story/2020-04-01/pandemic-netflix-documentary-coronavirus See also: https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20210902-the-100-year-old-fiction-that-predicted-today

74 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/dec/25/worried-about-super-intelligent-machines-they-are-already-here

75 https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/nov/05/kanye-west-condemns-metoo-movement-as-nineteen-eighty-four-mind-control

76 “ By the end of its second episode, I knew that Netflix’s new series ‘Emily in Paris’ was not a lighthearted romantic travelogue but an artifact of contemporary dystopia.” https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/emily-in-paris-and-the-rise-of-ambient-tv

78 https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2022/jan/17/dystopia-core-what-is-new-pandemic-era-punk-look-fashion

81 https://0-www-ft-com.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/content/a3a53ae8-b1e3-11e8-8d14-6f049d06439c , https://www.statnews.com/2019/01/30/purdue-pharma-oxycontin-maker-explored-addiction-treatment/ , https://hyperallergic.com/406965/how-some-of-the-worlds-biggest-art-patrons-contributed-to-the-opioid-crisis/

83 https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2021/07/22/uk-government-approves-50percent-funding-cut-for-arts-and-design-courses

84 “Obscene. That is the word, a word of contested etymology, that she must hold on to as a talisman. She chooses to believe that obscene means off-stage. To save our humanity, certain things that we may want to see (may want to see because we are human!) must remain off-stage” (Coetzee 2003, 168).

85 The mass death event induces an epiphany in the Conservative-voting, business-owning male protagonist about the exploitation of essential workers, while the female NGO liberal-lefty understands that her altruism isn’t as profoundly disinterested as she had previously held. In focusing on the egregiousness of the pandemic, rather than seeing its perspective on the malaise underpinning the workings of society, the play foregoes its outrage when the daily death toll climbs for an insipid appeal to benevolence and compromise.

88 https://0-www-ft-com.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/content/10d8f5e8-74eb-11ea-95fe-fcd274e920ca ; https://www.economist.com/leaders/2021/11/20/the-world-is-entering-a-new-era-of-big-government

89 This year, the world’s 2,600-plus billionaires have become $1.6 trillion richer: https://www.forbes.com/sites/chasewithorn/2021/12/08/the-worlds-billionaires-have-gotten-16-trillion-richer-in-2021/?sh=4a449482c219 See also: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/oct/05/richest-americans-became-richer-during-pandemic

90 Aristotle Kallis writes of “a vast and forbidding archipelago of fiercely competing micro-sovereignties pulling further and further apart from each other” https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/countering-radical-right/has-covid-brought-about-far-right-dystopia/

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Sean Mark , «  Pandemic Fictions: Covid-19 and the Cultures of Dystopia  » ,  Sillages critiques [En ligne], 32 | 2022, mis en ligne le 30 novembre 2022 , consulté le 29 mai 2024 . URL  : http://0-journals-openedition-org.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/sillagescritiques/13330 ; DOI  : https://0-doi-org.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/10.4000/sillagescritiques.13330

Université Catholique de Lille Sean Mark is Maître de conférences (Lecturer) in English at the Université Catholique de Lille, where he teaches literature, civilisation and translation. After graduating from University College London, he completed a PhD in comparative literature at the universities of Tübingen, Bergamo and Brown, on a fellowship from the European Commission in the Cultural Studies in Literary Interzones doctoral programme, and in 2018–19 was British Academy postdoctoral fellow at the British School at Rome. He has published in The Edinburgh Companion to Ezra Pound and the Arts , Modernism and Food Studies , The Ezra Pound Studies Biennial and Modernism/modernity . For Chelsea Editions Press, he has edited and translated two books by contemporary Italian poets, and his translations have appeared in the Italian Poetry Review and InVerse . His first monograph, Pound and Pasolini: Poetics of Crisis , is published by Palgrave Macmillan.

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Framing the fourth sector – dystopia or future contours?

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• Published: 27 May 2024

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• Marisa R. Ferreira   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-4194-9127 1 ,
• Vítor Braga   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-3644-3992 1 ,
• María Isabel Sánchez-Hernández   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-6806-1606 2 &
• Joana Gomes 3  

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Nowadays, society faces complex social, economic, and environmental problems which the traditional sectors of activity (public, private and third sector) are not able to solve alone. To respond to these challenges, their missions and strategies have been converging, leading to a phenomenon known as the blurring of boundaries between sectors. Together, they give rise to a new and promising sector in society: the fourth sector. The literature on this new sector is still scarce, even though its impact is already being felt all over the world. The concept of the fourth sector is in itself broad and clearly lacking defined borders. In addition, there are three currents in the literature that use this term with different meanings.

This paper aims to contribute to the theoretical knowledge on the fourth sector by clarifying its definition and framing its activity. A qualitative methodology was carried out by using the papers featuring the topic “fourth sector”, indexed to the Web of Science, to generate a textual corpus that led to a similarity analysis. Subsequently, written interviews were conducted with seven academic specialists on the fourth sector topic, selected through the snowball sampling method, to complete the data obtained through the literature review. These data were added to the initial textual corpus, and a new similarity analysis was generated. It is concluded that the fourth sector as a spectrum of hybrid organizations is currently the most accepted approach, and the existence of an activity that combines a business framework with a social purpose seems to be its main characteristic. So, the main implication is related with significant opportunities that have yet to be fully explored, considering the extensive rise of the fourth sector.

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1 Introduction

Traditionally, organizations are categorized into the public, private, and third sectors (Avidar, 2017 ; Carswell et al., 2012 ; Hyde, 2023 ), and have long shaped our collective landscape by reflecting the cultural patterns, values and norms of the society in which they emerged. Nevertheless, globalization, the shifts of technological advancement, and the growing complexities of contemporary societies have reshaped the narrative of organizational existence (Fourth Sector Network, 2009 ; Pires, 2017 ; Rask et al., 2020 ).

Nowadays, society faces complex problems, dispersed on a global scale (Carswell et al., 2012 ; Stötzer et al., 2020 ) of economic, social and environmental nature, such as corruption, global warming and even a pandemic crisis (Martins et al., 2021 ), not to mention a large disparity between rich and poor, and traditional sectors (public, private sector, and the third sector) by themselves are not able to respond to these challenges, forcing them to work together (Guerrero & Hansen, 2018 ; Howlett & Lejano, 2013 ). Increased awareness of social and environmental issues, and the desire of individuals and organizations to address these issues in a meaningful way have led to a shift in values, as more and more people prioritize the impact of their actions on others and the planet. Given their complexity, these deep and progressive changes in society imply new ways of thinking and acting, triggering the emergence of activities that do not fit into traditional sectors and constitute new organizational configurations (Sánchez-Hernández et al., 2021a , b ). At the same time, we now face a growing trend of migration to urban areas, which has led to increased demand for services and support, thus creating opportunities for organizations to address pressing social and environmental issues in urban settings. Several authors call this phenomenon the blurring of boundaries between traditional sectors (Avidar, 2017 ; Carswell et al., 2012 ; Fourth Sector Network, 2009 ; Sabeti, 2011 ).

In the public sector there has been a slimming down of the state, for sometimes we face the inability of governments to fully address social issues on their own, and other times we have smaller governments and the delegation of some responsibilities characteristic of the welfare state to third-sector entities (Laurett & Ferreira, 2018 ), with a concomitant reduction in funds, privatization and decentralization of services (Carswell et al., 2012 ). States intervene on a national scale, but social problems go beyond borders, are globalized and multicultural (Escobar & Gutiérrez, 2011 ). In the profitable sector, companies have adopted more socially responsible and sustainable stances to respond to the demands of their stakeholders who are attentive to their practices (Carswell et al., 2012 ). Third-sector organizations find themselves in an increasingly competitive environment, and have to respond to growing social problems with less state funding (Faulkner et al., 2023 ; Pärl et al., 2022 ). Thus, they are forced to turn their practices to the market to obtain alternative forms of financing (Song, 2022 ; Zhu & Sun, 2020 ). They increasingly use the strategy of creating networks of partners that allow them to obtain added value (Escobar & Gutiérrez, 2011 ). It is in the context of this convergence of missions from the various sectors that a new entity emerges, the so-called fourth sector (Fourth Sector Network, 2009 ; Sabeti, 2011 ). The fourth sector is a new and promising sector of society, marked by a dual purpose: to generate profit and social impact by using different strategies, such as intersectoral collaboration and hybrid organizations (HO) (Escobar & Gutiérrez, 2011 ). As it is a relatively recent phenomenon, the fourth sector remains shrouded in ambiguity, with definitions dispersed amidst a sparse landscape of literature. Therefore, it is clear that we need a more holistic and collaborative approach, and in this study, we start from the following research proposition: The fourth sector arises from the intersection of the three traditional sectors, and it is defined by pursuing social objectives but with profit-making purposes (Fig. 1 ). This work aims to clarify the definition and frame the scope of its activity, generating a theoretical contribution to the existing knowledge on the fourth sector and main related concepts.

The fourth sector as the intersection of traditional sectors.  Source: Author’s creation, adapted from Sánchez-Hernández et al. ( 2021a )

2 Literature review

In broad terms, the fourth sector refers to a new type of organization/model that exists alongside the traditional three sectors of the economy — the public sector, the private sector, and the nonprofit sector —, and is characterized by its focus on social and environmental impact, rather than solely on profit (Rask et al., 2020 ). There are currently three main approaches (see Table 1 ) that use the designation fourth sector, despite having very different characteristics.

The first approach (Williams, 2002 , 2005 ) associates the fourth sector with informal volunteering (IV), also called one-on-one, which is distinct from that associated with third-sector organizations (Heley et al., 2022 ). It is characterized by a spontaneous movement of people towards their community.

The second approach, Hybrid Organizations (HO), is in line with our research proposition. It is the most devoted to organizations that do not purely belong to any traditional sector. It arises from the premise that today’s most significant social problems cannot be addressed without the participation of the three traditional sectors (Escobar & Gutiérrez, 2011 ; Sánchez-Hernández et al., 2021a , b ). It is in this proximity of missions from the various sectors that a new entity emerges, the so-called fourth sector. In this approach, it is defined as “a new protagonist in the socioeconomic sphere that results from the convergence of various sectors in organizations and business models that seek to respond to social and environmental problems through social innovation” (Escobar & Gutiérrez, 2011 , p33). In this approach, the fourth sector revitalizes the concept of the social economy (Ávila & Campos, 2018 ) by encompassing the traditional sectors (Rubio-Mozos et al., 2019 ). Under the hybrid business string (Zurbano et al., 2012 ), the identification of the fourth sector generally applies to one of the following alternatives:

i) Social organizations with economic results: Organizations that generate economic and social value in the market, such as social enterprises (Borzaga et al., 2020 ), but also traditional companies with aspirations that identify themselves as companies that go beyond classic CSR.

ii) New ways of doing business (from the point of view of positive social and environmental impact), and those entities in the public sphere that try to be more oriented to the specific needs of people, but also those that intend to innovate regarding the participation and involvement citizens in the co-creation of public services by using market methods (Sánchez-Hernández et al., 2021b ).

The third approach, called self-organized civic activism (SOCA), refers to civic movements spontaneously generated in the community that use new technologies and social networks (Raisio et al., 2019 ). According to Rask et al. ( 2018 ), its main characteristics are spontaneity, great dynamism, the absence of bureaucracies, a horizontal structure without hierarchies, and dissociation from formal organizations. The same author states that these movements are criticized for their potential risk, since these are initiatives based on goodwill, but lack knowledge and coordination.

According to Rask et al. ( 2018 ), these various approaches can be summarized to try to find an integrative perspective, by considering them as a growth regarding the level of organization and stability over time. The integrative definition is the following: “the fourth sector is an emerging field, composed of actors or actor’s groups whose foundational logic is not the representation of established interest, but rather, the idea of social cooperation through hybrid networking” (Rask et al., 2018 p.46).

To sum up, the fourth sector works in a spectrum of HO. At one end of the spectrum there are third-sector organizations with profitable activities, social enterprises at the center and, at the opposite end, companies whose activity has significant social impact. These organizations bear characteristics such as greater or lesser presence in the market, and different degrees of focus on social concerns (Fourth Sector Network, 2009 ). These HO have a dual purpose: on the one hand, they are economically viable and, on the other hand, their purpose goes beyond profit and seeks ethical and sustainable goals, as well as creating benefits through their activities for society as a whole and the planet (Rubio-Mozos et al., 2019 ). Sabeti ( 2011 ) summarizes some of these characteristics: having a social purpose, a business method, transparency, social and environmental responsibility and giving fair compensation to employees. These main arguments consider that can generate returns for investors and shareholders if they do not jeopardize their ability to act in favor of their mission. These hybrid entities combine the best that each of the traditional sectors has to offer, in order to respond to shared social objectives in a sustainable and lasting way, through social innovation (Avidar, 2017 ; Escobar & Gutiérrez, 2011 ; Sánchez-Hernández et al., 2021b ). Sabeti ( 2011 ) considers that these HO feature a new model of entrepreneurship, developed by entrepreneurs motivated by social causes, which are not exclusively profitable or non-profitable, and can be called “for benefit”, since they generate income, but prioritize the social mission, acting in a variety of areas, such as poverty, social exclusion, health, decent work, among others. In the fourth sector, initiatives can exist without a formal organizational structure, constituting themselves merely as “entities” that fill the empty spaces left by traditional sectors and also as forms of cooperative and networked functioning (Escobar & Gutiérrez, 2011 ).

The fourth sector can be considered a transition towards sustainable businesses by introducing social purpose into the strategic management line of organizations (Rubio-Mozos et al., 2019 ). To sum up, and according to the Ibero-American Secretariat General of the IE University, the fourth sector “is a complement, not a substitute, to the other sectors” (IASG, 2019 , p. 21) that works to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030. Consequently, sustainability is the heart of the emerging fourth sector. At this point, it is important to mention that it can be challenging to measure the performance and the impact of the fourth sector (Núñez-Barriopedro & Llombart Tárrega, 2021 ), as it may involve intangible outcomes, such as increased social cohesion or improved quality of life. As such, it is important for organizations in the fourth sector to be transparent about their impact measurement processes and to continuously strive to improve the quality and reliability of their data.

In general, the distinction between the third and fourth sectors lies in their fundamental purposes, organizational structures, and orientations towards profit and social impact. The third sector, often referred to as the nonprofit sector, comprises organizations that operate primarily to address social, environmental, or cultural needs, rather than to generate profit. These organizations, including charities, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and community groups, typically rely on donations, grants, and volunteer efforts to sustain their operations (Stühlinger & Hersberger-Langloh, 2021 ). The third sector plays a crucial role in filling gaps left by government and business in addressing societal challenges and advocating for social change.

The fourth sector represents a novel paradigm that bridges the gap between traditional for-profit and nonprofit sectors by integrating social and environmental objectives into business models (Piedrahita et al., 2021 ). Fourth-sector organizations, which might be dubbed as social enterprises or impact-driven businesses, aim to generate revenue while simultaneously addressing social or environmental issues (Martins et al., 2021 ; Rask et al., 2020 ). They operate under a hybrid model that emphasizes both financial sustainability and positive social impact. The fourth sector encompasses a wide range of entities, including B Corporations (B Corps), social purpose corporations, and cooperatives, all of which prioritize the triple bottom line — people, planet, and profit.

While the third sector focuses primarily on addressing social needs through philanthropy and community service, the fourth sector represents a more integrated approach to social change by leveraging market mechanisms and entrepreneurial strategies. Both play vital roles in advancing social progress and addressing complex challenges, but they differ in their approaches to resource mobilization, governance structures, and models of social impact (Sanzo-Pérez et al., 2022 ; Zhu & Sun, 2020 ). As the boundaries between sectors continue to blur, understanding the distinctions and synergies between the third and fourth sectors is essential for developing effective strategies to address pressing global issues and promote sustainable development.

3 Methodology

We used an innovative approach by combining a very specific literature review with the opinion of experts on the topic via a similarity analysis. Our research is based on a qualitative methodology, using content analysis performed through the IRaMuTeQ software. Content analysis is a research method used in qualitative studies and encompasses different techniques to generate knowledge in a systematic and rigorous way, based on textual information generated during the investigation (White & Marsh, 2006 ). In the context of the IRaMuTeQ software, similarity analysis refers to the examination of similarities or patterns within textual data, particularly in qualitative analysis, such as text mining and content analysis (Camargo & Justo, 2013 ). The software employs various techniques for lexical analysis, including frequency counts, co-occurrence analysis, and concordance analysis; subsequently, similarity is measured and the software offers visualization tools to represent it graphically. The similarity analysis involves a method called Hierarchical Cluster Analysis (HCA), which we will use in our analysis, and the software arranges the data into a hierarchy of clusters based on their similarities. At each step of the process, the algorithm merges the two most similar clusters, until all data points are grouped into a single cluster.

A qualitative methodology combining content analysis and expert interviews can be well-suited to achieve the objective of contributing to the theoretical knowledge (Döringer, 2021 ) on the fourth sector by clarifying its definition and framing its activity, because (i) this allows exploring deeply into the content of papers and interviews, potentially uncovering nuances, patterns, and themes within the data that may not be apparent through quantitative methods; (ii) as a relatively new and evolving concept, the fourth sector requires an exploratory approach; (iii) by analyzing the content of relevant papers and conducting interviews with experts, we gain a deeper understanding of how the fourth sector is conceptualized, operationalized, and practiced in different contexts and settings, and this contextual understanding is crucial for framing the activity of the fourth sector within its socio-economic, political, and cultural contexts.

The selection of articles included in the sample is presented in Fig.  2 . At first, the Web of Science (WoS) database was used to search for the term “Fourth Sector”, resulting in a total of 31 results over the period from 1996 to 2023. Only scientific papers were included in the sample. After a brief reading, all those papers that did not correspond to the concept under study were excluded. This selection resulted in 13 papers, dated from 2011 to 2020, associated to the database through the areas of study of management, economics, sustainability, and public policies (Appendix 1 ). Finally, the abstracts of these papers were formatted in a document that constitutes the textual corpus, imported to the IRaMuTeQ program and subsequently analyzed. To understand which concepts stand out in the summaries of the literature analyzed and the relationship between them, a similarity analysis was carried out, the result of which can be seen in Appendix 2 .

Selection of articles included in the sample

Subsequently, written interviews were conducted, consisting of two open-answer questions to seven academic specialists regarding the definition of the fourth sector, its main characteristics, and what distinguishes it from more traditional sectors of activity, as well as a practical example of what that could be considered a fourth sector entity. These specialists were selected through the snowball sampling method to complete the data obtained through the literature review. Firstly, we identified two specialists and sent them emails because of their research proximity to this topic under study. We requested them to respond to our questions and to recommend a colleague who works closely on the topic. We ceased the identification of new specialists upon reaching saturation, meaning that we began to hear the same themes, patterns, or information repeatedly across the interviews. This indicated that the data collection process had sufficiently captured the range and depth of experiences or perspectives related to the research topic. We had 4 Portuguese and 3 Spanish experts, from the areas of economics (3), geography (2), social economy (1) and marketing (1), as we can see in Table  2 . These data were added to the initial textual corpus, and a new similarity analysis was generated (see Appendix 3 ); the insertion of the data regarding the experts’ interviews has caused some changes in the similarity analysis.

The data collected originated two similarity analysis. Similarity analysis A (Appendix 2 ) refers to the content of the abstracts of the papers included in the sample, and similarity analysis B (Appendix 3 ) cumulatively encompasses the textual data of the papers and the answers to the interviews carried out with experts on the field of the fourth sector. The interviews were completely transcribed and added to the software.

4.1 Similarity analysis A

The abstracts of the articles included in the analysis originated 3 clusters with 11 distinct related sections. The sections are potential thematic or conceptual grouping of textual data that identify patterns and /or relationships. Two of the clusters were equivalent to the previously identified theoretical frameworks (HO and IV), and the third one was devoted to the third sector (TS cluster). The number of occurrences for the same word ranged from 18 to 3.

1st) HO cluster, including most of the sections:

Section 1 – The central concept is the research term “fourth sector”, either because it is the most frequent (18 times), or because it has the most sections that are directly associated with overlapping (5 times in total). Associated with the concept “fourth sector”, there is the word “emergence” (4 times). Also directly associated with this are words that refer to the various traditional sectors of activity, namely “government”, “third sector” and “company”. The word “company” occurs a total of 16 times, and it is the central concept of Sect. 2, responsible for bridging the gap between Sect. 1 and several other Sects. (3, 8, 9, 10, 11). Less expressiveness is found for the concepts “government” and “third sector”, with 3 and 4 occurrences, respectively, thus occupying a secondary position within this section. Also noteworthy is the word “purpose” associated with the “fourth sector” concept.

Section 2  – The word “company” is very central, and we have the word “contribute” (7 occurrences) linked with “planet” (4); “person” (4) and “community” (3). Concepts related with sustainability concerns are “sustainability” (6) “sustainable development goals” (8) “corporate social responsibility” (4), and “sustainable strategic management model” (3) feature prominently in this section, and are shared with the adjacent Sects. 3 and 4.

Section 3 – Highlights the intersectoral relationship characteristic of one of the trends in the fourth sector. The most prominent concept is “business”, centrally positioned between the concepts “for-profit” (7) and “nonprofit” (5). The term “nonprofit” branches out into concepts such as “for-benefit” (4), “benefit corporation” (6), “structure” (8), “legal” (3) and “entrepreneur” (5). From the concept “for-profit”, words such as “environmental” (4), “social” (8) and “economy” (4) are linked through the word “combine”. This section highlights the dual purpose of the fourth sector to generate profit and social impact.

Sections 4 ,5 ,6 ,7 – These represent examples of fourth-sector initiatives, such as the protection of coral reefs (Cruz-Trinidad et al., 2011 ) and collaboration between universities, industry and technology in Saudi Arabia (Shin et al., 2012 ). As they are specific cases in the literature, the concepts that represent them have little prominence in the general panorama, and are notable for their small frequency and ramification.

2nd) TS cluster, including the following 3 sections:

Section 8 – Emerges as a transition section between the sections of empirical approach to the fourth sector (1, 2, 3) and Sects. 9 and 10, which feature theoretical content. As concepts of connection to the first group, words such as “sustainable development goals” (8) and “management” (5) can be highlighted, which branch out into theoretical concepts, such as “model” (12) and “academic” (5).

Sections 9 and 10 – These are theoretical sections, featuring “notion” (14) and “concept” (16) as central concepts.

3rd) IV cluster for one isolated section: 

Section 11 – This is one of the most distant sections from Sect. 1. It does not share concepts or overlap with any other section. It is linked to Sect. 3 through the word “public” (10), which will branch out to the concept “policy” (14). At the far end appear concepts related to the definition of the fourth sector presented by Williams ( 2002 ), which refer to informal volunteering, namely “micro-volunteering” (6) and “volunteering” (4).

The HO cluster is the most important one. It should be noted that of the 3 traditional sectors of activity, the most referred to is the private sector, with a high frequency of words: “company” (16), “business” (10), “for-profit” (7), “corporate” (4), “corporate social responsibility” (4), and “private” (4), with a total of 45 references. Even so, the reference to the involvement of the three traditional sectors are clear, which, given the new dynamics of action, gives rise to the fourth sector. On the side of the public sector, we can find occurrences of several terms such as “policy” (13) “public” (8) and “government” (1), with a total of 22 references. Non-profit organizations are represented by terms such as “social economy” (9), “social” (10), “nonprofit” (5), “third sector” (4), in a total of 28 references.

4.2 Similarity analysis B

The insertion of data related to the interviews with experts in the previous textual corpus presents some remarkable modifications:

In similarity analysis A, there were 11 sections, while B is composed of 12. The term fourth sector lost some of its centrality, and now there are two distinct groups. Thus, the HO cluster involving the term “fourth sector” (Sect. 1) is spatially separated from a new cluster (HO business) involving the concept of “business” (3-a).

Section 3, whose most prominent terms is “business”, undergoes changes compared to the previous similarity analysis, and concepts that lacked great prominence in this section, gain greater preponderance in this new analysis, giving rise to 3 distinct and overlapping Sect. (3-a, 3-b, and 3-c). Section 3-c has as its central term the word “social”, and Sect. 3-b the word “for-profit”, which denotes that there is a subdivision of types of business, some pursuing a social purpose and others an exclusively economic purpose.

Section 4 in the first analysis ceases to exist as an autonomous section and the words that constitute it are integrated into Sect. 3, thus losing relevance. This was expected, as experts were informing about the topic but avoiding examples or specific practical evidence. These words were mostly related to a particular case study, having little impact on the overall picture.

Section 11 subdivides into Sect. 1-a and Sect. 1-b (a new cluster for the relationship between the public and the private sector, the PL-PR cluster). In addition, Sect. 1-a continues to encompass the definition of the fourth sector as informal volunteering. Section 11-b, which is the new PL-PR cluster, becomes the transition section between Sect. 1 “fourth sector” and Sect. 3-a “business”. The central words are “sector”, “public” and “private”, and the supporting word “integrate” also appears, coming from the concept “third sector” that appears at the far end of Sect. 1 “fourth sector”. This list of words once again suggests the intersectoral collaboration of the fourth sector.

The connection of Sect. 1 “fourth sector” to transition Sect. 1-b (“private” and “public”), and subsequently to section business, is the word “third sector”, suggesting that it is particularly this sector that makes the connection between everyone and enhances their collaboration in market initiatives.

5 Discussion

Analyzing the two similarity analyzes, it is possible to verify the prominence of terms such as “emergence”, defined as the emergence or becoming prominent, directly associated with the term “fourth sector” denotes the novelty that it constitutes.

One of the objectives of this research was to clarify the definition of the fourth sector, and the results obtained point to the majority trend in the scientific literature to use the term as a spectrum of hybrid organizations (HO). In the similarity analyses, concepts that could be associated with the fourth sector, such as self-organized civic activism (Rask et al., 2020 ), were not evident. Therefore, in the context of the fourth sector, civic activism underscores the idea of citizen-led efforts to drive social innovation and impact, thus blurring the lines between traditional sectors and fostering collaborative, community-driven solutions to complex problems, although this bottom-up approach was not clearly present in the similarity analyses.

The definition of the fourth sector as informal volunteering was mentioned in a single paper, and therefore is of little significance for the results, with only two associated terms — “micro-volunteering” (6) and “volunteering” (4). In these cases, the term fourth sector is used as a synonym for informal volunteering (Williams, 2002 , 2005 ), and, more recently, it has been used in the context of organizations that promote social good through business initiatives (Cuthill & Warburton, 2005 ). In this context, informal volunteering (individual-based help) is as prevalent as formal volunteering (group-based help), and is predominant among deprived populations, although the third-sector approach should be complemented by a fourth-sector approach that focuses on one-to-one aid, because while affluent populations engage more in voluntary groups for social reasons, lower-income groups rely heavily on one-to-one aid to improve their material circumstances (Williams, 2002 ). Nevertheless, the scarcity of more recent papers that support the definition of informal volunteering is quite evident. Therefore, the data obtained in this research corroborate the idea that the definition of the fourth sector as informal volunteering is in disuse.

The presence of terms related to the three traditional sectors of activity, which appear in various sections, related to each other and associated with the concept of fourth sector, are a contribution to the premise that the growing dimension and complexity of emerging socioeconomic problems greatly exceeds the capacity of organizations, and the public, private and social sectors alone are not able to generate adequate responses (Austin & Seitanidi, 2012 ). Thus, organizations from various sectors (public, private and social) are pressured to collaborate in multi-sector partnerships (MacDonald et al., 2019 ). However, the presence of terms such as “business” and “company” is obvious, which could suggest a special focus on the private sector. These terms are associated with words such as “for-benefit”, denoting the central role of HO in the fourth sector. Despite having a strong focus on the market, these are a new model of entrepreneurship, developed by entrepreneurs motivated by social causes — which are not exclusively profitable or non-profitable — and are called for-benefit, as they generate income and prioritize the social mission, acting in a variety of areas such as fighting against poverty, health, environment, among others (Sabeti, 2011 ). Therefore, the data are suggestive and present a fourth sector that does not fully overlap with the concept of multi-sector partnerships. In addition to the convergence of missions and planned joint action, the existence of profitable activity and focus on social problems seems to be essential for it to be considered an entity in the fourth sector. This same perspective is mentioned in the literature (Wilburn & Wilburn, 2014 ) when referring to the fourth sector as a new business model that enables a structure that helps (1) the expansion of third-sector organizations, (2) a profitable sector whose activity is intrinsically linked to social responsibility, and (3) entrepreneurs who intend to invest in businesses committed to transforming society. Despite this evidence, another explanation for the prominence of terms related to the profit sector is the fact that market-oriented organizations, such as the Benefit Corporation (Koehn & Hannigan, 2016 ), are more legally supported than others (e.g., networks and multisectoral partnerships), thus being easier to identify and study, and therefore resulting in a greater number of scientific papers.

The results found seem to suggest that the main role of the public sector in the fourth sector is the creation of policies and laws that regulate this sector. This focus on the “policy” concept may be due to the existence of three papers by the same author (Rubio-Mozos et al., 2019 , 2020a , b ) in a small sample. The authors advocate the need for a systemic approach, including governments, the academic community, the entities of the fourth sector and civil society. The proposed approach is called “4s SME’s engagement ecosystem”, which involves small and medium-sized companies in the fourth sector. The aim is to contribute to its development and the measurability of this “sustainable welfare economy”. Other authors corroborate this emphasis on the inexistence of basic policies for this sector. This trend has emerged organically, without a base structure to support it (Fourth Sector Network, 2009 ), and there is no environment prepared with adequate legislation, market regulation, accountability systems, among others, that are specific to this new sector of activity (Sabeti, 2011 ). The inexistence of these specificities will force entrepreneurs to fit into existing structures for other sectors, thus blurring their mission and objectives, increasing the bureaucracy and complexity of structures, and unnecessary expenditure of resources, resulting in a competitive disadvantage (Fourth Sector Network, 2009 ).

Economic, social and environmental sustainability were highlighted in the results obtained, and have been mentioned before (Ávila & Campos, 2018 ; Rubio-Mozos et al., 2019 ; Ventura, 2020 ). The fourth sector can catalyze society’s role in the pursuit of sustainability (Carswell et al., 2012 ), which is defined as “the development that seeks to respond to the needs of the present without compromising the capacity of future generations to respond to their own needs” (United Nations, 1987 ). Carswell et al. ( 2012 ) state that sustainability is triple bottom-line, requiring a balance between people, the planet and profit, and these same words were found in our similarity analyses. Although the two similarity analyses are relatively overlapping, there is something significant that differentiates them. There is a more marked separation between the “fourth sector” section and the “business” section, with the bridge being mediated by the term “third sector”, which will produce an island cluster, which includes the terms “public” and “private”. To note that the first similarity analysis was performed using international data, with papers from Europe, Asia, and America, while the second one includes data provided exclusively by Spanish and Portuguese specialists. As mentioned above, there is specific legislation at the international level that directly relates the fourth sector to the market, such as benefit corporations. However, this type of legislation does not exist in both countries, where the tradition of social causes is closely related to the third sector. Thus, it seems that, in Spain and Portugal, this fourth sector appears to be mediated by the third sector, which forms the bridge between the third and the public and private sectors. Thus, it seems that the second similarity analysis reflects the culture and legislation of both countries, in the sense that it gives greater prominence to the third sector as the main player in the emergence of the fourth sector. Two of the articles included in the sample (Cruz-Trinidad et al., 2011 ; Shin et al., 2012 ) refer to case studies that have little impact on the presented sections, even lacking associated concepts in similarity analysis B.

6 Conclusions and limitations

This study suggests that both the literature review and the opinions of experts converge to affirm that the definition of the fourth sector as a spectrum of hybrid nature organizations is the most accepted approach on the topic. The definition of the fourth sector as voluntary actions seems to be currently out of favor. Finally, there is no clear evidence of the association of the fourth sector with any kind of civic activism.

The results obtained corroborate the fourth sector as an emerging sector made up of actors from the three traditional sectors (public, private and third sector) that collaborate closely with each other. The focus on the business, especially from the experts’ side, is evident, and this practice seems to be the main factor that defines belonging to this sector. However, profit is not an objective in itself, as there must be a social purpose arising from the activity. The data obtained suggest that the main contribution of the public sector to the fourth sector is the creation of policies that legally frame its activity.

The widespread emergence of the fourth sector offers great potential that still remains largely untapped. Contrary to the American model, social enterprise in Europe and neighboring nations arises primarily from ingrained organizational structures and values intrinsic to European societies (Borzaga et al., 2020 ; LaVoi & Haley, 2021 ). These values encompass solidarity, self-help, participation, and the pursuit of inclusive, sustainable growth. Consequently, social enterprise thrives as a collective endeavor, embodying a communal entrepreneurial spirit. Many EU Member States exhibit imbalanced ecosystems, often neglecting critical components, such as capacity-building, networking, and cooperation. Therefore, a holistic ecosystem must prioritize improving public procurement processes (Borzaga et al., 2020 ).

The concept of sustainability closely intersects with the fourth sector, which represents a hybrid sector that blend elements of the public, private, and non-profit sectors. The SDGs established by the United Nations provide a framework for addressing global challenges, such as poverty, inequality, and climate change. Achieving the SDGs requires the active participation of various sectors, including government, civil society, and the private sector, namely the emerging fourth sector. Therefore, in this context, the fourth sector plays a crucial role in advancing sustainable development by integrating social, environmental, and economic considerations into its practices. Organizations operating within the fourth sector strive to create positive impact across multiple dimensions while ensuring long-term viability and resilience (IASG, 2019 ).

This study was delimited by specific keywords to guide the research, and therefore this targeted approach may not capture the totality of the scholarly discourse within this field. The main difficulties of our research were the limited number of papers available in the WoS database at the time of survey, which weakens the robustness of the results obtained, and consequently of the conclusions presented. We can also mention limitations related to the interviews, like the existence of preconceptions that might have influenced the answers, as well as the social desirability bias, where interviewees may have given answers that they believe are socially acceptable rather than reflecting their true thoughts or experiences.

However, the scarcity of research papers dedicated to the fourth sector justifies the analysis and makes this article a valuable contribution to shed light on this emerging field. We understand that having done the research only in the WoS database, despite its extensive citation analysis tools, has some limitations that might affect the comprehensiveness of the literature available on a given topic. Therefore, future research might include other databases and other classification criteria to ensure a more comprehensive and wide coverage.

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Marisa R. Ferreira and Vítor Braga gratefully acknowledges financial support from FCT- Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (Portugal), national funding through project UIDB/04728/2020.

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Sections and Clusters were identified with no specific order

Appendix 1 – Papers included in the sample

Appendix 2 – similarity analysis a.

Similarity analysis generated through IRaMuTeQ from textual corpus 1

Appendix 3 – Similarity analysis B

Similarity analysis generated through IRaMuTeQ from textual corpus 2

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Ferreira, M.R., Braga, V., Sánchez-Hernández, M. et al. Framing the fourth sector – dystopia or future contours?. Int Rev Public Nonprofit Mark (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12208-024-00406-9

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