Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic possesses in its abruptness and immediacy a quality of experience that stands out among other events of the 21st century. It urges us to break with established routines and, consequently, we find ourselves instantly forced to change our manners of conduct regarding ourselves, others, and the world. Based on a lived body-phenomenology and sociology of knowledge perspective, this article suggests conceptualizing the complex dialectic between experience-of-disruption and compulsion-to-continue as continuation-dynamics in the context of a world becoming unavailable. To the extent that actors no longer have practical routines available to them in order to face important challenges of everyday life, the experience-of-disruption generates stress. Actors’ ways of accessing the world have suddenly become unavailable to them. Confronted with a waning certainty regarding expectations, they are nonetheless confronted with a pressing need to follow up on and react to their experiences, i. e., continue. This condition unleashes an ambivalent disruption/compulsion dialectic with an indeterminate capacity for transformation. Using the example of the COVID-19 pandemic, we adapt Merton’s anomie theory to create a typology of continuation-dynamics in light of the experience of a world becoming unavailable. In this way, we intend to contribute to the effort of analyzing the stress dynamics of the pandemic specifically and, more generally, conceptualizing the dynamics of a world becoming unavailable.