Long before the arrival of Covid-19, the speed and contents of the news had made me feel almost overwhelmed with fear. Faced with a flood of images that includes migrant children in cages, melting glaciers and forest fires, it has felt impossible to process information, let alone assess the best way to react.

We’ve entered an era characterised by the twin forces of speed and instability, in which a superabundance of potential threats – running from Islamic State to nuclear war, the rise of the far right, Brexit, environmental catastrophe and now a global pandemic – is matched by a dearth of time in which to process them. It’s impossible to keep up, and far too alarming to look away. Thanks to the accelerating effects of social media, it’s begun to seem as if the social landscape is shifting at such a rate that thinking, the act of making sense, is permanently balked. It’s increasingly difficult to distinguish real danger from rumours, speculations, conspiracy theories and deliberate lies, a process the spread of coronavirus around the globe has only intensified. Logging into Twitter or following the rolling news has meant being trapped in a spin-cycle of hypervigilant anxiety.

If this virus shows us anything, it’s that we’re interconnected, just as Dickens said. We have to keep each other afloat

During this febrile period, I’ve found myself longing for a different kind of timeframe, in which it would be possible both to feel and to think, to process the intense impact of the news and perhaps even to imagine other ways of being. The stopped time of a painting, say, or the dilations of the novel, in which it is possible to see patterns and consequences that are otherwise invisible. Art has begun to feel not like a respite or an escape, but a formidable tool for gaining perspective on what are increasingly troubled times.

Can art do anything, especially during periods of crisis? In 1967, George Steiner wrote a famous essay about the deficiencies of art in the wake of the Holocaust. He argued that if a concentration camp commander could read Goethe and Rilke in the evening and still go about their duties at Auschwitz each day, then art had failed in its highest function, which he defined as the ability to humanise. The problem with this argument is that it implies for art to be successful it must act as a magic bullet, effortlessly reorganising moral faculties; in effect obliterating free will.

Art can’t forcibly induce a change in behaviour. It’s not a re-education pill. Empathy is not something that happens to us when we read War and Peace. It’s work, for which art can, however, provide us with radiant materials. Art can’t win an election or bring down a president. It can’t stop the climate crisis, cure a virus or raise the dead. What it can do is serve as an antidote to times of chaos. It can be a route to clarity, and it can be a force of resistance and repair, providing new registers, new languages in which to think.

One of the problems with the internet as a source of information is that there is no end, no definitive conclusion to be reached. You travel link by link, pursuing digressions and counter-claims, interrupted by continuous breaking updates. The novel, by contrast, is a technology of orderly revelation, slowing and speeding time so as to trace connections and consequences down into hours, minutes, seconds, or out into decades, even centuries.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The TV adaptation of Bleak House. Photograph: BBC/Mike Hogan

Dickens is the master of this, and it strikes me that there can’t be many better figurations for what information-gathering feels like on social media than Krook’s Rag and Bottle shop in Bleak House. This “general emporium of much disregarded merchandise” is overflowing with indeterminate objects, among them blacking bottles and pickling bottles, heaps of parchment scrolls, rags and hundreds of rusty keys. Buried somewhere in this maddening chaos is, or might be, a vital document, without which clarity and justice will never be achieved.

There’s a plague in Bleak House too, the hyper-contagious smallpox virus, which serves to underscore Dickens’s larger argument about interconnection, his determined attempt to show that social classes are not inviolate or impermeable, and that no group of people, no matter how grand or rich, are truly separate from their neighbours, no matter how poor or abject. The fever doesn’t respect titles or addresses, racing indiscriminately from the London slum of Tom-All-Alone to Bleak House itself. Esther catches it because she insists on helping the abject, homeless orphan Jo, shivering and stumbling from ditch to doorway, always being moved on. Realising she too is sick, she establishes herself in rigorous quarantine, knowing that by locking the door on her dear friend Ada, she is carrying out an act of love. “As she loved me and wished my mind to be at peace,” she instructs, “come no nearer than the garden”: the tender message of self-isolators everywhere.

One of the pleasures of Bleak House is that it’s a drama about the act of information-gathering itself, slowly and laboriously producing clarity and order out of lies, misinformation and occlusion. Back in the early 1990s, the critic and queer studies pioneer Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick wrote an illuminating essay about this vexed and essential process. Sedgwick was once described by Maggie Nelson as “fat, freckled, prone to blushing, bedecked in textiles, generous, uncannily sweet, almost sadistically intelligent and, by the time I met her, terminally ill”. She wrote “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You” at the centre of the Aids crisis, at a time when many of her closest friends and colleagues were dying difficult and painful deaths, and she herself was undergoing treatment for the breast cancer that later killed her.

That’s the thing about utopias, they keep you going, in a way that reading The Road does not

Though it was written predominantly for an academic audience, “Paranoid Reading” is about something that affects us all, which is how we approach knowledge and uncertainty, as we do constantly in the course of our daily lives, and particularly at times of disaster or rapid political change. Sedgwick begins by describing the paranoid approach, so common and widely practised that we sometimes forget there are alternatives to it.

A paranoid reader is concerned with gathering information, tracing links and exposing secrets. They anticipate and are perennially defended against catastrophe and disappointment. They’re always on the lookout for danger, about which they can never, ever know enough. Paranoia can be an appropriate mode in circumstances like those we’re in now, when knowledge is crucial and swift reactions matter. As the poet Anne Boyer observes in a much-shared essay about coronavirus, “fear educates our care for each other – we fear a sick person might be made sicker, or that a poor person’s life might be made even more miserable, and we do whatever we can to protect them because we fear a version of human life in which everyone lives only for themselves. I am not the least bit afraid of this kind of fear, for fear is a vital and necessary part of love.”

The difficulty lies in gauging the level and amount of information it’s useful to acquire. How much does the average citizen need to know about epidemiology or viral loads? Does the accumulated store of possible scenarios help a person to act safely or does it paralyse their capacity to act at all? Furthermore, how much of what is read is true, and how much is being used to convey a more sinister message, like Trump’s constant harping on a “foreign” virus, his deployment of a disease to broadcast propaganda about closed borders? At their worst, Twitter, Facebook and the like can be a factory for manufacturing speculation and mistrust, in which material travels more rapidly the more frightening it is, providing comprehensive evidence for hopelessness and dread.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature is an account of building his famous garden, see below, on the beach in his final years. Photograph: Krause, Johansen/Getty Images

Sedgwick’s essay arose out of a conversation in the mid-1980s with her friend Cindy Patton, an activist-historian of the Aids epidemic. At the time, there were rumours that Aids might have been deliberately engineered by the US military. Sedgwick was excited to hear what Patton thought and startled by her reply. “Suppose … that the lives of Africans and African Americans are worthless in the eyes of the United States; that gay men and drug users are held cheap where they aren’t actively hated; that the military deliberately researches ways to kill non-combatants whom it sees as enemies; that people in power look calmly on the likelihood of catastrophic environmental and population changes,” she said. “Supposing we were ever so sure of all those things – what would we know then that we don’t already know?”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jarman’s cottage at Dungeness in Kent. Photograph: Robert Bird/Alamy

What Sedgwick took away from this “congenial pessimism”, which strikes a definite echo with the present day, is that it isn’t always necessary to track down every piece of information about a crisis in order to respond effectively to it. Patton’s statement made her realise that there are other valid concerns for the artist, the activist, the citizen faced by emergency or disaster. At the very end of her essay, she briefly, tantalisingly floats another possible approach, which is more concerned with creativity and repair than the so-called hermeneutics of suspicion.

A useful analogy for what Sedgwick terms the “reparative” is to be fundamentally more invested in finding nourishment than identifying poison, a drive she locates in artists as diverse as the realist painter Jack Smith, artist Joseph Cornell, film-maker John Waters and Nightwood author Djuna Barnes. This is not the same thing as being naive or heedless, unaware of crisis or undamaged by oppression. Instead, it’s about being driven to find or invent something new and vital out of inimical environments. “What we can best learn from such practices,” Sedgwick explains, “are the many ways selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture – even of a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them.”

Sedgwick’s faith in art was hard-won, and derived in part from the crucial role it played during the plague years of the Aids crisis. In contrast to the rapid international public health response to coronavirus, the first cases of “gay cancer” in California and New York in 1981 were met with apathy and derision. In 1984, by which time 5,596 deaths had occurred in the US and it was estimated 300,000 people had been exposed to the virus, the Reagan press officer was still responding to questions about the epidemic by joking about the journalist’s possible infection status. Reagan himself didn’t say the word “Aids” until 17 September 1985. By the end of that year, 12,529 people had died.

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In such a situation, visibility mattered. In 1987, a six-person collective of artists in New York created the “Silence = Death” graphic, which became the international logo of Aids activism. This stark phrase was emblazoned in white letters on a black background beneath a pink triangle, taken from the insignia homosexuals were made to wear in concentration camps. It served to brand the call to arms, a crisp refutation of stigmatisation and homophobia.

If silence equalled death, then part of the work of resistance was to make the fact of enforced silencing visible, as well as conveying something of the damage it caused. In 1989, the American artist and Act Up activist David Wojnarowicz posed for a famous photograph. He gazes furiously at the camera, his lips sutured with five loose stitches. Three thin trickles of blood run down his chin. In this distressing image, hurt and repair are fused. The needle works through flesh, self-inflicted wounds announcing larger harm.

In our own era, the act of lip-sewing has been adopted by refugees. I’ve seen photographs of refugees with stitched lips made on the border between Greece and Macedonia, in an Australian immigration centre in Papua New Guinea, in Athens; all places where borders are closed to certain bodies and free passage is impeded. In these cases, the image possesses an uncanny power. It can travel where the body can’t. It migrates and strays, taking up permanent residence in the mind, revealing what – who – has been forcibly excluded from sight.

The desire to unveil hidden cruelty is also at work in a series of performances about rape carried out in the early 1970s by the Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta, while she was still a student at the University of Iowa. In 1973, a nursing student was brutally raped and murdered in campus housing. It took months before there was an arrest, and during that frightening period, Mendieta took it upon herself to create work about the attack, conveying her own horror, as well as drawing attention to the invisible epidemic of violence against women. In the first of these performances, she invited her fellow students to her apartment. When they arrived, the door was ajar. Inside, there was lavish evidence that a horrible crime had been committed. Mendieta was tied to the table, half-naked, her underwear around her ankles. Blood dripped on the floor. The students stayed an hour and for the entire time she didn’t move a muscle.

Mendieta was working right at the beginning of second-wave feminism, when it was still possible to believe in the power of revelation, the shock tactics of re-enacting violence as a vaccination, a homeopathic cure. But by the 1990s, Sedgwick was already beginning to wonder whether there wasn’t something weirdly naive about placing faith in this kind of unveiling, “as though to make something visible as a problem were, if not a mere hop, skip, and jump away from getting it solved, at least self-evidently a step in that direction”. As if violence is not titillating to certain appetites; as if the expression of pain cannot be consumed with relish.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Elisabeth Moss in the TV adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale. Photograph: George Kraychyk/AP

The faith in inoculation remains, of course. In 2017, the actor Elisabeth Moss announced her irritation with people who refused to watch the ultra-violent Handmaid’s Tale, a dystopic fantasy that felt closer by the day. “Really?” she asked. “You don’t have the balls to watch a TV show? This is happening in your real life. Wake up, people. Wake up.” But in the age of the internet, it’s very hard to think that anyone needs more evidence of violence. We’re already drenched in it, and its capacity to snap us out of numbness is grossly overstated. If anything, it does the opposite, glutting the viewer with despair.

The night before Trump’s inauguration, I saw the trans poet Eileen Myles read their own version of a presidential address at the London Review Bookshop. The vision they unfolded was the utopian inverse – painful! thrilling! – of what Trump would say the following day. Under Myles, the White House would be a homeless shelter, there’d be 24-hour libraries, free trains, free education, free food, archery for everyone; sure, why not? It felt reparative, listening to that. It felt like my imaginative ability to frame utopias and then to move purposefully towards them might have been restored, at least for a minute.

I had the same experience when I first read Always Coming Home, Ursula Le Guin’s 1985 collection of stories and anthropological fragments about a future civilisation, the Kesh, living in what is now California’s Napa Valley in the wake of an apocalypse that is never quite described. It was a relief to encounter such a formidable thinker using her imaginative energy, her humour and her extensive knowledge to construct a better, fairer, more environmentally sane society – its architecture, sexual arrangements, metaphors, toys, songs, clothes, medical practices and stories – rather than simply magnifying all that is worst about our own.

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That’s the thing about utopias, they keep you going, in a way that reading The Road or The Death of Grass does not. Le Guin was no less concerned about the oncoming ecological crisis than Cormac McCarthy, but her approach is calmer and more infused with hope. Hope has a bad press in our cynical age, but it doesn’t necessarily mean being disengaged, a Pollyanna blind to the state things are in or uninterested in how they got that way. Hope is the precursor to change. Without it, no better world is possible.

The same year that Wojnarowicz was photographed with his needle and thread, the film-maker Derek Jarman began the diary that would become Modern Nature, an account of building his famous garden on the beach in Dungeness, Kent. Jarman was diagnosed HIV-positive in the winter of 1986, years before the invention of combination therapy made long-term survival a probability. In the face of his own oncoming death, he didn’t give way to despair. Instead he elected to spend his time making this stony desert bloom.

He planted irises and roses directly into the shingle, encouraging a riot of wallflowers and valerian, “all the dark humours blown away by the wind”. This wild, unfenced arcadia sustained him through the political battles of his final years, and has now outlived him by more than quarter of a century. Last time I visited, in December, it was still humming with power.

I have the same feeling when I look at photographs by Wolfgang Tillmans or read a novel by Ali Smith. I had it when I went to see my friend Rich’s degree show at Goldsmiths and he’d made dozens of ceramic razor clams and anemones, downed planes and nubbly coral reefs. It’s a feeling of being inducted back into hope, a restoration of faith. It’s easy to give into despair. There’s so much that’s frightening, so much that’s wrong. But if this virus shows us anything, it’s that we’re interconnected, just as Dickens said. We have to keep each other afloat, even when we can’t touch. Art is a place where that can happen, where ideas and people are made welcome. It’s a zone of enchantment as well as resistance, and it’s open even now .

• Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency by Olivia Laing is published on 16 April by Picador (RRP £20). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15.