Biopolitics in the Time of Coronavirus

Why We Are Not Bare Life: What’s wrong with Agamben’s Thoughts on Coronavirus

In a follow-up to a controversial piece in which he argued (in late February) that the social distancing and quarantining in Italy presented the temptation to universalize the state of exception, Agamben says this:

“Fear is a bad counsellor, but it makes us see many things we pretended not to see. The first thing the wave of panic that’s paralysed the country has clearly shown is that our society no longer believes in anything but naked life. It is evident that Italians are prepared to sacrifice practically everything – normal living conditions, social relations, work, even friendships and religious or political beliefs – to avoid the danger of falling ill. The naked life, and the fear of losing it, is not something that brings men and women together, but something that blinds and separates them. Other human beings, like those in the plague described by Manzoni, are now seen only as potential contaminators to be avoided at all costs or at least to keep at a distance of at least one metre. The dead – our dead – have no right to a funeral and it’s not clear what happens to the corpses of our loved ones. Our fellow humans have been erased and it’s odd that the Churches remain silent on this point. What will human relations become in a country that will be accustomed to living in this way for who knows how long? And what is a society with no other value other than survival?”

To be sure, there are and will be bad actors. William Barr’s DOJ has apparently seen the epidemic as a good time for a power grab (notably, one that has been sharply critiqued from both the right and the left). Ohio seems to be using it as a pretext to stop abortions. So – and this will be my point – we must always be vigilant about the expansion of emergency powers.

But when you have a leitmotif, you stick with it, and so Agamben reiterates his basic thesis about the combination of state of exception and bare life:

“There have been more serious epidemics in the past, but no one ever thought of declaring a state of emergency like today, one that forbids us even to move. Men have become so used to living in conditions of permanent crisis and emergency that they don’t seem to notice that their lives have been reduced to a purely biological condition, one that has lost not only any social and political dimension, but even any compassionate and emotional one.”

This is obviously not literally true; Foucault’s example of a town in lockdown during the plague is on point. But certainly this is new at a global scale. Various responses in the thread point out the obvious: that many more people will die of COVID-19 than the annual flu; that “overreaction” makes perfect sense when you cannot make the sorts of risk-based, prudential calculations to which we have become accustomed. In the process of making the latter argument, I even suggested that the current social distancing measures are unsustainable because our society is based on movement and circulation. They indeed put our bios into suspension.

But what we learn from Agamben is mainly that the bios/zoe distinction (where bios refers to way of life, and zoe refers to the biological process of living) he is invoking here makes no more sense now than it did in Homo Sacer. In what way is life reduced to a “purely biological condition?” How is that even coherent? Agamben in Homo Sacer says that bare life is so thoroughly debased that it loses even the “sweetness” that comes originally with the act of living. He quotes Aristotle, who says that “there is probably some kind of good in the mere fact of living. If there is no great difficulty as to the way of life [kata ton bion], clearly most men will tolerate much suffering and hold on to life [zoe] as if it were a kind of serenity [euemeria, beautiful day] and a natural sweetness” (1278b, 23-31; qt HS 2, interpolations Agamben’s). We have all seen the touching videos of Italians singing together from their apartment balconies, and now there are Germans and Chinese singing in solidarity with them. These songs reject Agamben’s interpretation, even on his own terms!

Moreover, the idea that there is such a thing as purely biological life devoid of bios is rubbish. As William Connolly put it in response to Homo Sacer, “what a joke. Every way of life involves the infusion of norms, judgments, and standards into the affective life of participants at both private and public levels. Every way of life is biocultural and biopolitical” (in Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty and Life, 29). Consider even eating: what parts of how we eat are not cultural? That is, both there must be a bios to being quarantined, and the decision to prioritize avoiding illness must be a biopolitical one. The discordance between Trump and the more responsible members of the federal government shows that the reverse decision to prioritize what passes for the index of bios in Trump’s mind – the stock markets – is a cynically political one. When it is replicated by spring breakers in Florida or crowds in packed bars, they enact another political decision: their bios matters more than the zoe of society’s most vulnerable. When elevated to a principle, either of these comes carelessly close to saying that those vulnerable lives don’t matter, or are expendable. As Latour pointed out somewhere, we do this all the time: the decision to keep speed limits where they are is a decision that those who could be saved by lowering them are expendable. It is true that Italy has banned funerals for now and this should give us pause – but how is it better to imply that the lives of the most vulnerable are less important than large, non-funereal social gatherings of strangers during a pandemic? No doubt, balancing matters, and the right level of social distancing from an epidemiological point of view is probably somewhere between life-as-normal and being utterly confined to one’s own house with no exceptions, just as the right speed limit is somewhere between forcing everyone to walk and removing speed limits altogether. But how is this not a biopolitical discussion, one where the details matter? From an epidemiological perspective, at least, the spring breakers make it worse for everyone else: by refusing to socially isolate at all, they bring more isolation down on the rest of us. So too, as feminist theory has forcefully and for a long time underlined with regards to privacy, social distancing will be borne differently by different people. It’s one thing for an office worker to telecommute, and something totally different to confine someone indefinitely in a house with their abuser. We are differentially vulnerable and resilient, and recognizing those differences matters.

In other words, Agamben’s argument above replicates the problems of Homo Sacer because it obscures too many details that matter in figuring out how to navigate an impossible situation under conditions of radical uncertainty. It precisely obscures politics in the broader sense. Let me focus on the level of consequences. Agamben wrote that the apotheosis of bare life was found in Auschwitz, and in particular in the figure of the so-called Muselmann, “the most extreme figure of the camp inhabitant … a being from whom humiliation, horror, and fear had so taken away all consciousness and all personality as to make him absolutely apathetic” (Homo Sacer, 184-85). Antonio Negri calls this description dangerous:

“I believe that the concept of naked life is not an impossible, unfeasible one. I believe it is possible to push the image of power to the point at which a defenseless human being is crushed, to conceive of that extreme point at which Power tries to eliminate that ultimate resistance which is the sheer attempt to keep oneself alive. From a logical standpoint, it is possible to think all this: the naked bodies of the people in the camps, for example, can lead one precisely in this direction. But this is also the point at which this concept turns into ideology …. Isn’t this the story about Power that Power itself would like us to believe in and reiterate? Isn’t it far more politically useful to conceive of this limit from the standpoint of those who are not yet or not completely crushed by Power, from the standpoint of those still struggling to overcome such a limit, from the standpoint of the process of constitution” (In Praise of the Common, 155, my emphasis)?

Negri accordingly proposes that “the conclusions” Agamben “draws in Homo Sacer lead to dangerous political outcomes” (ibid.).

Here, Agamben’s procrustean bios/zoe distinction here doesn’t just ignore the evidence of bios in all forms of life. It ignores the efforts to find meaning and solidarity in life, in spite of and even because of quarantine. It ignores meaning and solidarity that challenges the conditions that led to quarantine. Citing Baudrillard’s controversial proclamation that 9/11 represented the West waging war on itself, Andrew O’Hehir proposes:

“We didn’t want this to happen; I’m not saying that. But we wanted something to happen. We all understood, consciously or otherwise, that the life we have all been living, the global economy we have created, was not sustainable. Many of us knew it would take a crisis of global proportions before we could consider that seriously, on the level of the human collective. Well, here we are. If the dolphins of Venice are not real, we invented them for a reason. We need them to show us the way.”

In treating life today as mere zoe, Agamben occludes the very voices and imaginings that might change the biopolitical status quo he so detests. And in doing that, he gives power to the Donald Trumps and William Barrs of the world. This is not a trivial point, because we should indeed fear the entrenchment of surveillance culture and the permanent replacement of human contact by the very screens that we now need to get through our day just as we should fear the accretion and normalizing of emergency powers. In a thoughtful essay on Slate (you really should read it), Steven W. Thrasher looks at his own research on the effects of HIV/AIDS (which has killed 38 million so far) and the resistance movements that emerged from it. He warns that social isolation is damaging in itself. He underlines that social distancing becomes bearable only if it is accompanied by data that allows it to be accurately targeted (one should remember here that Foucault’s plague-infested town was a place of data collection, not just frozen movement). He talks about how both epidemics have laid bare the necropolitics of Republican administrations that assume that only those they don’t care about will get sick and die. Thrasher recounts to politics of ACT UP and other groups, a politics based on putting bodies in the way and on the line. Thrasher concludes:

“There’s power in how, for the first time in history, any human on the planet can instantly communicate with any other and talk about facing the same challenge. This new crisis will change everything. Everything. Everything about how we work and socialize, everything about how we make love and make politics. It might very well be a less haptic world, a more screen-centered and surveilled world. The world will be rebuilt, and we have a chance to make it better—but this will only happen if we can figure out mutual care and mass mobilization with tactics that have never been used on such a scale before. We’d do well to listen to leadership from disabled activists who have a lot of experience with political action without needing physical presence. But we have to keep thinking critically. There are no easy answers, and the status quo won’t do.”

I don’t know if the current pandemic will change everything, or more to the point, what it will change. The 1918 flu pandemic likely brought us public health, starting with the Soviet Union and spreading to Europe and then, in diluted form, to the U.S. Thrasher documents the many changes HIV/AIDS have brought.

Being a part of these changes, pushing for the ones that are worth having and resisting those that are bad, will be vital. But if you see everybody in quarantine as Agamben sees Muselmänner, you also won’t see the politics that can move us forward. Donald Trump is a declining tinpot dictator who depends on a vast network of sycophants to constantly recreate the hall of mirrors in which he lives. He wants nothing more than for us to see social isolation as bare life, because then we can go back to making him richer, the body count be damned.

▻https://www.newappsblog.com/2020/03/why-we-are-not-bare-life-whats-wrong-with-agambens-thoughts-on-coronavi
#vie_nue #vies_nues

Biopolitics in the Time of Coronavirus

In a recent blog post (►https://critinq.wordpress.com/2020/03/29/the-rise-and-fall-of-biopolitics-a-response-to-bruno-latour), #Joshua_Clover rightly notices the swift emergence of a new panoply of “genres of the quarantine.” It should not come as a surprise that one of them centers on Michel Foucault’s notion of biopolitics, asking whether or not it is still appropriate to describe the situation that we are currently experiencing. Neither should it come as a surprise that, in virtually all of the contributions that make use of the concept of biopolitics to address the current coronavirus pandemic, the same bunch of rather vague ideas are mentioned over and over again, while other—no doubt more interesting—Foucauldian insights tend to be ignored. In what follows, I discuss two of these insights, and I conclude with some methodological remarks on the issue of what it may mean to “respond” to the current “crisis.”

The “Blackmail” of Biopolitics

The first point that I would like to make is that Foucault’s notion of biopolitics, as he developed it in 1976,[1] was not meant to show us just how evil this “modern” form of power is. Of course, it was not meant to praise it either. It seems to me that, in coining the notion of biopolitics, Foucault wants first and foremost to make us aware of the historical crossing of a threshold and more specifically of what he calls a society’s “seuil de modernité biologique” (“threshold of biological modernity”).[2] Our society crossed such a threshold when the biological processes characterizing the life of human beings as a species became a crucial issue for political decision-making, a new “problem” to be addressed by governments—and this, not only in “exceptional” circumstances (such that of an epidemic), but in “normal” circumstances as well.[3] A permanent concern which defines what Foucault also calls the “étatisation du biologique” (the “nationalization of the biological”).[4] To remain faithful to Foucault’s idea that power is not good or bad in itself, but that it is always dangerous (if accepted blindly, that is, without ever questioning it), one could say that this “paradigm shift” in the way in which we are governed, with both its positive and its horrible outcomes, no doubt corresponds to a dangerous extension of the domain of intervention of power mechanisms. We are no longer governed only, nor even primarily, as political subjects of law, but also as living beings who, collectively, form a global mass—a “population”—with a natality rate, a mortality rate, a morbidity rate, an average life expectancy, etc.

In “What is Enlightenment?” Foucault claims that he wants to refuse the “‘blackmail’ of Enlightenment”—that is, the idea that we have to be either “for” or “against” it—and address it instead as a historical event that still characterizes, at least to a certain extent, what we are today.[5] I would like to suggest, in an analogous way, that it would be wise for us to refuse the “blackmail” of biopolitics: we do not have to be “for” or “against” it (what would that even mean?), but address it as a historical event that still defines, at least in part, the way in which we are governed, the way in which we think about politics and about ourselves. When, on the newspapers or the social media, I see people complaining about others not respecting the quarantine rules, I always think about how astonishing it is for me, on the contrary, that so many of us are, even when the risk of sanctions, in most situations, is quite low. I also noticed the panoply of quotes from Discipline and Punish, in particular from the beginning of the chapter “Panopticism,”[6] which of course perfectly resonates with our current experience of the quarantine, as it describes the disciplinarization of a city and its inhabitants during a plague epidemic. However, if we just insist on coercive measures, on being confined, controlled, and “trapped” at home during these extraordinary times, we risk overlooking the fact that disciplinary and biopolitical power mainly functions in an automatic, invisible, and perfectly ordinary way—and that it is most dangerous precisely when we do not notice it.

Instead of worrying about the increase of surveillance mechanisms and indiscriminate control under a new “state of exception,” I therefore tend to worry about the fact that we already are docile, obedient biopolitical subjects. Biopolitical power is not (only) exercised on our lives from the “outside,” as it were, but has been a part of what we are, of our historical form of subjectivity, for at least the past two centuries. This is why I doubt that any effective strategy of resistance to its most dangerous aspects should take the form of a global refusal, following the logic of the “blackmail” of biopolitics. Foucault’s remarks about a “critical ontology of ourselves”[7] may turn out to be surprisingly helpful here, since it is the very fabric of our being that we should be ready to question.

The (Bio)Politics of Differential Vulnerability

The second point that I would like to discuss—a crucial one, but alas one that I rarely find mentioned in the contributions mobilizing the notion of biopolitics to address the current coronavirus pandemic—is the inextricable link that Foucault establishes between biopower and racism. In a recent piece, Judith Butler rightly remarks “the rapidity with which radical inequality, nationalism, and capitalist exploitation find ways to reproduce and strengthen themselves within the pandemic zones.” This comes as a much-needed reminder in a moment in which other thinkers, such as Jean-Luc Nancy, argue on the contrary that the coronavirus “puts us on a basis of equality, bringing us together in the need to make a common stand.” Of course, the equality Nancy is talking about is just the equality of the wealthy and the privileged—those who are lucky enough to have a house or an apartment to spend their quarantine in, and who do not need to work or can work from home, as Bruno Latour already observed. What about those who are still forced to go to work every day because they cannot work from home nor afford to lose their paycheck? What about those who do not have a roof over their head?

In the last lecture of “Society Must Be Defended,” Foucault argues that racism is “a way of introducing a break into the domain of life taken over by power: the break between what must live and what must die.”[8] In other words, with the emergence of biopolitics, racism becomes a way of fragmenting the biological continuum—we all are living beings with more or less the same biological needs—in order to create hierarchies between different human groups, and thus (radical) differences in the way in which the latter are exposed to the risk of death. The differential exposure of human beings to health and social risks is, according to Foucault, a salient feature of biopolitical governmentality. Racism, in all of its forms, is the “condition of acceptability” of such a differential exposure of lives in a society in which power is mainly exercised to protect the biological life of the population and enhance its productive capacity.[9] We should therefore carefully avoid reducing biopolitics to the famous Foucauldian formula “making live and letting die.”[10] Biopolitics does not really consist in a clear-cut opposition of life and death, but is better understood as an effort to differentially organize the gray area between them. The current government of migration is an excellent example of this, as Martina Tazzioli convincingly shows when talking of “biopolitics through mobility.”[11] Indeed, as we are constantly, sometimes painfully reminded these days, biopolitics is also, and crucially, a matter of governing mobility—and immobility. Maybe this experience, which is new for most of us, will help us realize that the ordinary way in which “borders” are more or less porous for people of different colors, nationalities, and social extractions deserves to be considered as one of the main forms in which power is exercised in our contemporary world.

In short, biopolitics is always a politics of differential vulnerability. Far from being a politics that erases social and racial inequalities by reminding us of our common belonging to the same biological species, it is a politics that structurally relies on the establishment of hierarchies in the value of lives, producing and multiplying vulnerability as a means of governing people. We might want to think about this next time that we collectively applaud the “medical heroes” and “care workers” who are “fighting the coronavirus.” They deserve it, for sure. But are they really the only ones who are “taking care” of us? What about the delivery people who make sure that I receive what I buy while safely remaining in my quarantined apartment? What about the supermarket and pharmacy cashiers, the public-transportation drivers, the factory workers, the police officers, and all of the other people working (mostly low-income) jobs that are deemed necessary for the functioning of society? Don’t they also deserve—and not exclusively under these “exceptional” circumstances—to be considered “care workers”? The virus does not put us on a basis of equality. On the contrary, it blatantly reveals that our society structurally relies on the incessant production of differential vulnerability and social inequalities.

The Political Grammar of the Crisis

Foucault’s work on biopolitics is more complex, rich, and compelling for us today than what it appears to be under the pen of those who too quickly reduce it to a series of anathemas against disciplinary confinement and mass surveillance or who misleadingly utilize it to talk about the state of exception and bare life.[12] I do not want to suggest, however, that the notion of biopolitics should be taken as the ultimate explanatory principle capable of telling us what is happening and what the “solution” to all of our problems is—and this, not only because of the “historically differentiated character of biopolitical phenomena” correctly emphasized by Roberto Esposito, but also for a deeper methodological reason. Our political thought is a prisoner to the “grammar of the crisis” and its constrained temporality, to the extent that critical responses to the current situation (or, for that matters, to virtually all of the recent economic, social, and humanitarian “crises”) do not seem able to look beyond the most immediate future.[13] Thus, if I agree with Latour that the current “health crisis” should “incite us to prepare for climate change,” I am far less optimistic than he is: this will not happen unless we replace the crisis-narrative with a long-term critical and creative effort to find multiple, evolving responses to the structural causes of our “crises.” To elaborate responses, instead of looking for solutions, would mean to avoid short-term problem-solving strategies aiming at changing as little as possible of our current way of living, producing, traveling, eating, etc. It would mean to explore alternative social and political paths in the hope that these experiments will last longer than the time between the present “crisis” and the next one, while acknowledging that these transformations are necessarily slow, since we cannot just get rid of our historical form of being in the blink of an eye. In a word, it would mean having faith in our capacity to build a future, not only for ourselves, but for countless generations yet to come. And to actually start doing it.

▻https://critinq.wordpress.com/2020/04/02/biopolitics-in-the-time-of-coronavirus