Post #7

The Biopolitics of COVID-19

The term ‘biopolitics’ can be understood as the intersectional relationship between human life and the role of politics, the guiding political rationality which takes the administration of life and populations as its subject, in Michel Foucault’s words: “to ensure, sustain, and multiply life, to put this life in order” (The Will to Knowledge: History of Sexuality, 1976). Consequently, Foucalt coined the term ‘biopower’ to describe a set of phenomena which he recognized as “the set of mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human species became the object of a political strategy, of a general strategy of power,” characterizing the power dynamic between a population of subjects and the political regimes which aim to regulate, control, and intervene upon the mechanisms of human life through its authority over knowledge, power, and processes of subjectivation.

In other words, biopower, as Foucault sees it, describes the way in which biopolitics is put to work in society, viewing population “as a political problem, as a problem that is at once scientific and political, as a biological problem and as power’s problem,” exerting mechanisms of power over it and subjecting it to precise control and comprehensive regulation. According to him, this phenomenon characterizes a subtle and gradual shift in the role of government from one of sovereign power — the right to take life or let live — to that of biopower: the right to ‘make’ live and ‘let’ die (Society Must Be Defended, 1976). While there are many mechanisms through which governmental institutions can exert control over the state of the population — regulation of food prices, border control, law enforcement, poor relief, education, health care — there is one which, given the circumstances, stands out as especially pertinent to our daily lives: the planning and execution of epidemic control. It is under this framework that we must consider how the emergence of a widespread, global pandemic in the form of COVID-19 helps shape the role of biopolitics in our modern world, and continues to demonstrate the power dynamic between the safety and security of the population at large and the motivations of the political regimes which preside over them.

SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19 and the subsequent upheaval of society in countries all over the globe, easily transmissible and highly contagious, provides a unique example in biopolitics which suggests that the interconnectedness of a globalized world may prove to be its detriment. As Foucault suggests in The Birth of the Clinic, diseases can be “cured only if others intervene with their knowledge, their resources, their pity,” and accordingly, “the illnesses of some should be transformed into the experience of others.” With the spread of coronavirus, we have witnessed just that in an unprecedented way: originating in Wuhan, China, the illnesses of some have widely transformed the experiences of people all over the world. As a result, nationalistic figures calling for closed borders and pointing racially-charged fingers have been empowered and emboldened in the midst of crisis, demonstrating efforts to exert greater control over the forces of population and shaping public attitudes around their own political motivations. With cries for the construction of walls and widespread claims of the “China virus,” these biopolitical responses to the emergence of a global pandemic has opened the door to widespread xenophobia, and as many experts suggest, may signal the end of globalization as we now know it. Stephen M. Walt, one of said experts, suggests that “COVID-19 will create a world that is less open, less prosperous, and less free,” as governments of all types adopt emergency measures and expand state powers to manage the crisis and population, powers he suggests “many will be loath to relinquish when the crisis is over.”