Coronavirus, freedom and Biopolitics
An epidemic that is saturating everything: social interactions, medical institutions, States, powers … This unprecedented period could however be the opportunity to rethink our relationship to globalization, to the living, to freedom, and bring back to the forefront the notion of “biopolitics” developed by Michel Foucault.
This epidemic reminds us first of all that any disease is a social fact: it affects individuals, others, and more broadly society (doctor, researchers, governments), and its transmission, its spread, is notably the result of social interactions (gatherings, crowds). The peculiarity of this virus is that it is demographically and socially selective: on the one hand, this virus causes more victims among the elderly and frail, on the other hand, this virus can be more deadly for the most precarious individuals (who have little or no access to care). A disturbing consequence of this peculiarity is the resurgence of a perception of death that had become inconceivable to us. It is no longer a death due to war, terrorism, or old age, but a death that lurks, silent, capable of braving any obstacle and applying itself to all. And yet, death has become part of everyday life through its numbers. World governmentality has gradually evolved from a governmentality of life to a governmentality of death: the world is punctuated by the number of daily deaths, infected cases, people in intensive care, etc.
Beyond the social dimension, this global epidemic also raises questions about the value placed on health in our societies. The former Director General of Health, William Dab, recently announced that ‘epidemics are crash tests of our society’s values and the value we place on health'.
While in France the value given to public health interests has sometimes been neglected (the asbestos, Mediator, contaminated blood affair, etc.), this epidemic episode highlights the indispensable nature of public health and public services at the international and global level. Every country affected by the epidemic seems in reality to be suffering today from the neo-liberal wind that has been sweeping the planet for several decades now, and which has gradually weakened our health systems. Indeed, the consequences of this global epidemic on our societies may reflect previous political and ethical choices regarding the organization of health systems, which have led to a progressive weakening of the latter. For example, European health systems, once proud, are now in a precarious state. This precarisation is notably the result of several factors: austerity policies (inevitably leading to systematic cuts in health budgets), progressive privatisation of health care, limited hospital beds, doctors and resources, reduced research and investment, etc. Logically, today, the health systems of these “developed” countries (Italy, Spain, etc.) are collapsing, and are forced, for lack of means, to choose who to make live and who to let die. Quite similarly, there are 28 million people without any social protection in the United States. Many cannot afford (non-reimbursed) screening, which costs between $2,000 and $4,000. Thus, the risk of spreading the virus increases, and the number of deaths with it. Will we learn from this crisis? It is still too early to say. What is certain is that health remains first and foremost an existential value, the primary condition for freedom.
Human, too human
If health systems are sick with neo-liberalism, human is sick with its relationship to the living. His occupation of new frontiers of ecosystems in recent decades: intensive and industrial agriculture and poultry breeding (which led to avian flu), trade in wild and exotic animals (as in China), genetic manipulation, expansion of predatory tourism, deforestation, abuse of antibiotics, to name but a few, are all part of a systemic process in which new properties are developed, sudden and accelerated changes are generated, which modify the socio-ecological dynamics as we know them today.
We must realize that the emergence of this global epidemic is not a ‘natural disaster’. The progressive destruction of the biological barriers present in nature leads to an almost mathematical result. Each cause has an effect. The coronavirus pandemic is just one more item on a blacklist that, to one degree or another, has been a threat to humanity, but also warnings: SARS-CoV in 2002, the flu called “avian” (H5N1) in 2003, swine flu (H1N1) in 2009, Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS-CoV) in 2012, Ebola in 2013 or Zyka (ZIKV) in 2015. As stated former WHO Assistant Director-General for Health Security, Keiji Fukuda, “We feel like we have avoided a bullet” bypassing these pandemics. But the past few years seem to mark an extreme saturation of human action on the living. The years 2019–2020 are sadly the most convincing illustration: recurrent mass fires (California, Amazon, Australia), causing the death of 2.3 million animals in the Amazon and more than one billion in Australia, ice floes half smaller in winter than the average of previous decades, an average temperature 2 degrees higher than the average temperature 1981–2010, the melting of old glaciers which could release viruses 15 000 years old and today the coronavirus epidemic.
Humans are everywhere, so the biological barriers with the wild world are being broken down. This virus is yet another opportunity to realize that humans are not the only living force on this planet. This epidemic is yet another reminder: going beyond the regional to the global, it reminds everyone of their vulnerability and lethality, and calls into question the overflowing pride of modern capitalism, which has led to the unbridled conquest of life. It is necessary to regain awareness that Man is part of a complex fabric of the living, and by dint of wanting to appropriate it by fracturing and disrupting it, he exposes himself to these threats, which can lead to its disappearance.
The apparent limits of “globalization”
Globalization of the world is not new. Already in 1918, the spread of the Spanish flu from Europe and the United States to Africa and India illustrated a connection between states. Today, globalization is no longer in doubt. However, this epidemic is generating state behaviour that is synonymous with withdrawal, which may lead to a temptation to return to nationalism.
Little by little, this epidemic is pushing every country to turn inward and close its borders. Thus, each State is focused on its own population and responds to the crisis as best it can. A form of nationalization of the virus can thus be observed, allowing a rapid shift in the martial lexicon in the discourse of heads of state. The virus is then seen as an enemy of “war” and “invasion” that comes from abroad (Donald Trump considered himself “wartime president” and closed the borders of the United States on March 11th by speaking of “foreign virus”). French President Emmanuel Macron also hammered “We are at war” many times in his speeches. Words of war in peacetime, which seem to be generalized in the speeches of Western heads of state. However, it is important to remember that none of the populations of these states is in the grip of armed confrontation, but rather of a biological phenomenon to which they must protect themselves. The only conflict that is currently taking shape remains an economic one.
Globalisation now seems to be showing certain limits and capitalism is being shaken in its own constitution: while strict quarantine measures are being taken all over the world to contain the spread of the virus, this policy is proving to be absolutely contrary to the need for mobility and dynamic markets. Social confinement is a necessity, but at the same time it is economic suicide for capitalism. Governments around the world are struggling between epidemiological debacle and economic debacle. A dilemma then arises for some, between saving life and GDP growth. This is the case of Boris Johnson, who just a few weeks ago wanted to let 60% of the British population be infected with the virus, without imposing major social restrictions on mobility and activity, knowing that around 400 000 people were going to die. If Boris Johnson backtracked on his policy of “herd immunity”, while testing positive for the virus, this frightening policy reveals an instrumental way of representing the lives of thousands of human beings, in the quantitative category of “population”. The latter erases the faces, the personal stories, to become only a functional number: X number or percentage of individuals.
Biopolitics and freedom
The maximum saturation caused by the coronavirus has elicited different responses from the States, each with different results (China, Korea, Italy or Spain have different results). As we have said, what we see developing is the gradual adoption of strict quarantine measures. This clearly paves the way for the consolidation of the logic of an extraordinary or emergency situation, which allows democracy to be ‘put on the back burner’ and can serve as a basis for the normalization and permanence of ‘exceptional’ regimes. One of the effects of this has been to bring the notion of “biopolitics” borrowed from Michel Foucault back to the forefront of the discussions.
Biopolitics is the moment in which society’s control over individuals is not (or no longer) achieved solely through consciousness or ideology, but also in and with the body, i.e. the moment in which a number of biological traits, which affect a population, become the element on which politics and power will act. This has led to an unprecedented expansion of all forms of state intervention and coercion. From mandatory vaccinations to smoking bans in public spaces, the notion of biopolitics has been used in many cases as a key to understanding the political and ideological dimensions of health policies. This notion is all the more topical today as it seems to be in its highest expression.
In “Surveiller et punir”, published in 1975, Michel Foucault thinks of the logic of quarantine through the management of the plague epidemics that affected the world at the end of the 17th century: “This closed, cut-out space, watched over at all points, where individuals are inserted in a fixed place, where the slightest movements are controlled, […] where each individual is constantly spotted, examined and distributed among the living, the sick and the dead — all this constitutes a compact model of the disciplinary system”.
Apart from the avowed aim of containment, which is to contain the epidemic, Foucault emphasizes through this study that quarantine is also an opportunity for a “dream”: that of a disciplinary society, realizing “the penetration of the rules into the finest details of existence […] Behind the disciplinary devices is the haunting of “contagions”, plague, revolts, crimes, vagrancy, desertions, people appearing and disappearing, living and dying in disorder”. The powers of order fear mixing, movement, disorder. Yet, in the closed confines imposed by quarantine, the individual finds himself isolated and immobilized, under the eye of the powers that be.
The paradox, on this biopolitical reading, is that it seems that in response to this epidemic crisis, we are reintroducing the old tactics of control, exclusion, discipline, quarantine. A country such as China is now developing, in parallel with this quarantine structure described by Foucault, individualized control technologies that Foucault would have had no idea of (citizen notation, facial recognition, prediction algorithms, decryption of communications, mobile phone tracking, use of drones, etc.). Even in movement, the individual now occupies a “fixed place” in the digital world that governs the disciplinary 2.0 society. A virtual and imperceptible quarantine, so to speak, which is the delight of authoritarian regimes.
China’s success in halting the growth of contagion has thus opened channels of legitimization for this high-intensity biopolitics: “There are cases where you have to put a veil on freedom for a while, like hiding the statues of the gods” said Montesquieu. But the feeling that freedom is gradually disappearing as a value to be protected can arise. The risk of maximizing biopolitics, from a Foucauldian point of view, is that individuals who survive, having witnessed the death of a certain number of human beings, will be ready to bend to any restrictive measures in order to save their lives. In this extreme case, any imposition of isolation and closure will be accepted, and hostility towards the other could be seen as the only solution to save one’s life (the sudden rise of racism towards Asian populations would be an example).
Gilles Deleuze
This new societal arrangement, in China or elsewhere, fits quite well with what Gilles Deleuze described as a “control society”, i.e. a society in which control of persons is “no longer by confinement, but by continuous control and instantaneous communication”. However, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben reminds us that a state of exception must not become the normal paradigm of a corporation. A society of control (which today seems viable in view of security issues) can be particularly dangerous. While the case of China is particularly compelling at present, the maximizing practice of Foucauldian biopolitics is not limited to China alone. But what alternatives exist to this form of biopolitical governance in this pandemic context?
To try to answer this question, we must first recall that Foucault advocated a society in permanent search of freedom, without stripping it of all discipline. By this we mean that the concept of biopolitics described above does not simply revolve around a dystopian principle. The question then arises, particularly in the present context, whether a different biopolitics is possible. That is, as the Greek philosopher Panagiotis Sotiris put it: “is it possible to adopt collective practices that promote what we would call the health of large populations, without this being the result of a parallel expansion of forms of coercion and surveillance?”
Again, Foucault’s work provides a possible answer to this question. He refers to an alternative living policy, which would combine individual and collective care with arrangements that do not involve constraints. The objective of this alternative would be that decisions to restrict movement during an epidemic, to avoid smoking inside closed premises or to choose individual and collective practices that do not harm the environment, would not be adopted for fear of punishment, but in the context of a democratic process, following a decision that would be taken collectively.
This “democratic” biopolitics would then advocate a dissemination of knowledge that would make it possible to take action in a more collective manner, based on real knowledge, and not only obey decisions taken for individuals, by experts. An existing illustration of this type of biopolitics is the fight against AIDS. In the 1980s and 1990s, associations such as ACT UP or AIDES wanted to raise public awareness of what is still called the “pink plague”. Between prevention and dissemination of knowledge related to the disease, through brochures, telephone hotlines or even talks, the democratization of knowledge has led to an awareness of society. The popularization of knowledge has thus led to a greater demand for education on sexual practices, funding for the development of therapeutic measures and access to public health services, which would probably not have been possible without the struggle of these movements. If it takes time, this democratic biopolitics seems possible.
Finally, in the near future, it will be a question of rethinking the world in which we live, and thinking about the one in which we want to live. If we have not learned from past epidemics (SARS 2003, 2009, MERS-Cov 2012), we will have to learn from our present. This epidemic is an opportunity to rethink our lifestyles, our relationship to life, our relationship to excessive production, to consumer society, our relationship to freedom and our relationship to life. In 1945, the work of women in factories and offices to replace men was supposed to be a temporary solution during the Second World War, yet at the end of the war women continued to work in this way. The torments of history have sometimes accelerated many social advances: what will be the fate of the COVID-19 epidemic?
The question arises once again: will lessons be learned?