14 Making of a biopolitical event

Here political sociological focus is not simply placed upon a specific discourse like medicalization, or more specifically, “epidemiological view of society” (Bratton, 2021), nor is simply to critique hegemonic representations of the pandemic e.g., that it had a truly global and unifying character, and therefore made possible an experience of common humanity; that the administrative and logistical measures taken are reminiscent of concentration camps as in the initial response of Italian political philosopher Giorgio Agamben known for his work on homo sacer. The goal is to explore the multiplicity of ways in which the pandemic is produced as an event.

Bratton offers the notion of technological realism to argue that operating on biopolitical grounds does not necessarily imply repressive or authoritarian politics, given that the very definition of the concept by Foucault meant to unchain the theory of power from the constraints of the ‘negative’ view on it. While Foucault did want to draw attention to growing networks of power, its becoming micro-physics of power, he also questioned what he termed state-phobia in his lectures on State, Territory, Population as well as Birth of Biopolitics. Negative view of power can conceive of the exercise of political force over the population only as repressive (or racist, fascist). Critical political commentary on biopower, when it employs a logic of exclusion to problematize biopower (as in highlighting those segments of the population that do not receive care), does not fully operate within the premises of the biopolitical theoretical paradigm. Foucault’s framework is useful in describing not brutal exclusion but creative inclusion through new epistemological strategies, therefore not erasing but making of subjects [7].

In Foucault’s analysis, the biopower was built around towns and later on with the population of the nation-state. This proves to be one of the most crucial limitations of the framework that leans on and reproduces the administrative lenses of the state. If 21st-century capitalism already laid this bare, the pandemic pressed harder for new answers for the specific question of how to think biopolitics if the relevant population is not that of the nation-state.

This is a complicated question because the pandemic was foremost brought to light through measures by testing, the number of hospitalizations, and the rate of morbidity within the population of a given sovereign state, which in fact conducted these surveys in different intensities. These calculations rectified as statistical norms of state populations were then related to country-specific variables -number of hospitals and ventilators, population density, and dubious categories of leadership and cultural norms insofar as these impacted the curvature of rates across time. The numbers were projected into the future as probabilities of new cases of infections, hospitalization and morbidity. Moreover, state-specific population measures made it possible to compare countries and develop discourses, preventive strategies, and channel data/affect around the axis of state-centric governance.

Even if Capital already escaped nation-state in how it moves commodities, conducts derivative finance, and protected itself from accountability and taxation and even if the virus proved the planetary scale of interconnectedness across human and nonhuman, the punctuation of the event and its subsequent threading/unfolding ran through what may have been deemed irrelevant level of politics of the sovereign states. We shall now give a few examples from the digital milieus on the technical and narrative performances showing a series of translations, transfigurations of technical materiality in process.

This is a snapshot of ‘Coronavirus trajectory tracker’ developed and published online by Financial Times. It is then used by the economist Paul Krugman in his tweet on March 29, 2020 which I will discuss after examining the event-specific genre of biopolitical data-visualization.

Not only the planetary data is framed in terms of state populations, but nationalized rates are also complemented with country-specific responses that are used to suggest an explanation for their relative difference from the calculated group-norm. Thus, South-Korea flattened the curve by “huge test-and-trace programme / got on top of the outbrake.” Japan is represented as having “strong social norms around civil obedience and mask-wearing.” Singapore’s outlier position is explained by “strict quarantine rules & contact tracing” and Hong Kong’s by “school closures, quarantine and community response.” In these markers, ideological representation and materiality are not opposed but co-emergent. Population dynamics are modulated in their circulation. Then, the pandemic provides a veritable ground to observe social logic of datafication whereby in its very movement data is made, expanded and supplemented. As Clough puts it in relation to the work of media theorist Mark Hansen and political economist Randy Martin:

Following three screenshots are taken from twitter feed of Krugman as one of many diffracted receptions of biopolitical reading of the pandemic as an event. Using this original twitter genre, thread—a short one composed of three tweet-long sequence complemented with an appreciative extra tweet indicating the source, Krugman attaches a new layer of ideological interpretations such as the one added by Financial Times “strong civil obedience around social norms” channeling demonstrative potential of the graphic towards political leadership.

Interestingly, Krugman leaves out Turkey which shows the fastest increase in new cases. In fact, the curve of Turkey is left un-progressed after the 10th day giving legitimacy to Krugman’s declaration that US has the worst response. Any thorough scholarly reading of the graphic would require at least a mention of this anomaly. Of course, there is no official editorial mechanism in the public circulation of opinions except for what is deemed transgressive of privately managed ‘community standards’. While the gap of Turkish trend in cases goes untreated, Krugman develops his improvisatory social diagnosis in two seemingly conflicting timeframes. The noise in the interpretation is acknowledged (‘shocking’) without fleshing it out as a matter of logical contradiction. In fact, Krugman both asserts particularity and continuity where particularity loses its explanatory function. The response is both figured as shocking and as continuation of a long trend.

Attuned with the rhetorical strategy of the articulation of contrast as an engine for derivation of intensities—shocking, but explainable, exceptional to the particularities of the executive office, but continuation an American tendency—in the first tweet the causal distance—the distance between cause and effect—is proximate, in that, For Krugman it has a lot do the with the competence of the executive office. But the second tweet shifts the temporal optics and conversely argues that this deterioration is an expression of the longer durée of the ‘our terrible health performance’.  The third tweet synthesizes dissonant multi-temporal articulations of the first two tweets, into a series of sociological facts, ideological dispositions, policy choices. Krugman moves along contrasts, serializes diverse affective tonality of the data threading the shocking with the normal, punctual to historical effectively channeling the potential of the data into continuity. Not only Krugman erases the gaps and contradictions in his narrative account, but also, he refrains from interruptions, open questions as gateways through which future thought can arrive that can deal with the dissonances in his account. The thread evidences event-specific compositional affordances of new media which allows combination of several layers of political performances.

Works Cited

Bratton, B. H. (2021). The revenge of the real: Politics for a post-pandemic world. Verso Books.

Clough, P. T. (2016). Rethinking race, calculation, quantification, and measure. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 16(5), 435–441. https://doi.org/10.1177/1532708616655760