Let's see... can I write about the second chapter of this book in a fun and engaging way?
Nobody wants to look at the hole COVID blew in our collective psyche anymore. Boo hoo for me. You could analogize it to Walter Benjamin's angel of history; I would analogize it more to trying to outswim the sinking Titanic (like COVID itself, another smashing success for capitalist society).
Here's a general summary of the first chapter of this book, at least up to the part that I find really interesting (there's more, a four-part typology of different types of ideologies, that I will cover later).
Subjectivity refers to acting as a subject in a given context; it is not the same thing as personality.
Ideology interpellates human beings as subjects. This is Althusser again, who describes ideology as a "quadruple system" of 1. interpellating individuals as subjects; 2. subjecting them to the big-S Subject (like God, or the king, that kind of thing); 3. facilitating mutual recognition between Subject and subject, subject and subject, subject and self; and 4. "the absolute guarantee that everything is really so" (Therborn's words). Althusser's system can be summarized, tersely, as interpellation-recognition and subjection-guarantee.
Keeping Althusser's concept of interpellation-recognition (following from above), Therborn modifies the description from Althusser's original subjection-guarantee to subjection-qualification. Subjection to some kind of ideological discourse process in turn qualifies the subject for various kinds of roles.
Ok, so far so good. The interesting part of this chapter is what comes next. Therborn digs into how this subjection-qualification process really happens; he argues that "ideologies subject and qualify subjects by telling them, relating them to, and making them recognize" the following three things: what exists (ontology), what is good, right, or just (normativity), and what is mutable or changeable (possibility). Therborn also notes that these three things form a logical structure for defending (or upsetting) any extant order. Now do you see where I'm going with the COVID takes?
The ideological closure around COVID has taken all three of these forms. Arguments from ontology -- I would include in here various forms of minimizing that all fall under the loose category of "misinformation." Of course, there are extreme ontological arguments along the ideological Möbius strip where far-right conspiracism (COVID-19 is a microchip or whatever) shades into "crunchy" cultic wellness (the vaccines turn you infertile or whatever).The good news is that those kinds of conspiritual attitudes about the virus are still pretty fringe. The bad news is that the ideological function of the mainstream discourse is just as sinister. I think it operates on the other two levels of interpellation, or subjection-qualification, the levels of normativity and possibiity.
Examples of the normative dimensions of COVID minimizing abound. Preventing COVID spread is good, insofar as it doesn't conflict with any profit-generating activity -- then it's bad. Masks and masking are probably the most interesting case study here, with an entire army of MD goons hammering away at their laptops to stigmatize and demonize masking. Even more prosaically, though, think about the success of the punditocracy in reframing getting sick with COVID from something bad, to be avoided at all costs, to something good, even beneficial. Your immune system is like a muscle; it's "in debt" (my favorite) and needs to get off its ass and work, fighting off an active infection.
The arguments from possibility are individually beneath all contempt but add up to a really grim Gestalt. If we had a more equal society, if we had a stronger social safety net, if we had affordable health care, then maybe we could do something about the problems that exist. But we don't. So our lack of social supports and political power become not only determinants of the failed pandemic response, but also justifications for inaction that transcend time ("masks have a time and a place," as one CDC guidance document infamously said, but that time is neither in the past, nor in the present, nor in any possible future).
As Therborn writes, there is a logical progression from the ontological to the normative to the possible and back again here -- sure, huge inequalities in COVID infections and outcomes exist, but if we addressed COVID spread we would actually be hurting people by adding to the national immunity debt, and in any case it's all moot since people, for reasons that are completely intrinsic to them and not amenable to intervention, won't take the vaccine. And doesn't disparity sound so much nicer than inequality?)
There's something interesting in here about public health, too. If expertise represents (as I am arguing here now, and thinking about generally) a form of privatized, privately-appropriated knowledge, then what are the specific ideological functions of public health expertise? This is a big question that I'm going to be thinking through in much more detail, but just off the top of my head: to rationalize the policies and political desires of whoever happens to hold power at the moment. This happens along all three dimensions above: ontology (there are high risk and low risk people, sick and healthy, rational and vaccine-hesitant), normativity (the Biden administration's vaccine-only approach is good, because, per the ontological commitments of our ideology, personal choice is supreme), and possibility (and besides, it's not possible to get people to take a vaccine or do anything any other way than simply making it kind of available -- maybe some behavioral economics nudges).
These notes are very sketchy (sorry!) but it should be noted and emphasized here at the end that this is all a process of interpellation. The marketplace of ideas this ain't. It's much more than simply an argument, or someone being right or wrong, or even propaganda. This is a process that profoundly shapes our reality, how we see ourselves, how we move through the world, and how others see us doing it. For this reason I appreciate that Therborn is careful to note that not all ideologies are reducible to class ideology; not all ideologies sit comfortably inside the framework of "class consciousness." We are much more like bugs in a spiderweb of intersecting ideological processes.