<nettime> Against Agamben: Is a Democratic Biopolitics Possible?

[nettime's avid reader <nettime@kein.org>]

Against Agamben: Is a Democratic Biopolitics Possible?
by Panagiotis Sotiris • 14 March 2020

https://criticallegalthinking.com/2020/03/14/against-agamben-is-a-democratic-biopolitics-possible/

Giorgio Agamben’s recent intervention which characterizes the
measures implemented in response to the Covid-19 pandemic as an
exercise in the biopolitics of the ‘state of exception’ has
sparked an important debate on how to think of biopolitics.

The very notion of biopolitics, as it was formulated by Michel
Foucault, has been a very important contribution to our understanding
the changes associated with the passage to capitalist modernity,
especially in regards to the ways that power and coercion are
exercised. From power as a right of life and death that the sovereign
holds, we pass to power as an attempt to guarantee the health (and
productivity) of populations. This led to an expansion without
precedent of all forms of state intervention and coercion. From
compulsory vaccinations, to bans on smoking in public spaces, the
notion of biopolitics has been used in many instances as the key to
understand the political and ideological dimensions of heath policies.

At the same time it has allowed us to analyse various phenomena, often
repressed in the public sphere, from the ways that racism attempted
to find a ‘scientific’ grounding to the dangers of trends such
as eugenics. And indeed Agamben has used it in a constructive way,
in this attempt to theorise the modern forms of a ‘state of
exception’, namely spaces where extreme forms of coercion are put in
practice, with the concentration camp the main example.

The questions regarding the handling of the Covid-19 pandemic
obviously raise issues associated with biopolitics. Many commentators
have suggested that China made steps towards containing or slowing
the pandemic, because it could implement an authoritarian version
of biopolitics, which included the use of extended quarantines and
bans on social activities, which was helped by the vast arsenal of
coercion, surveillance and monitoring measures and technologies that
the Chinese state has at its disposal.

Some commentators even suggested that because liberal democracies lack
the same capacity for coercion or invest more on voluntary individual
behaviour change, they cannot take the same measures and this could
inhibit the attempt to deal with the pandemic.

However, I think that it would be a simplification to pose the dilemma
as one between authoritarian biopolitics and a liberal reliance on
persons making rational individual choices.

Moreover, it is obvious that simply treating measures of public
health, such as quarantines or ‘social distancing’, as biopolitics
somehow misses their potential usefulness. In the absence of a vaccine
or successful anti-viral treatments, these measures, coming from the
repertoire of 19th century public health manuals, can reduce the
burden, especially for vulnerable groups.

This is especially true if we think that even in advanced capitalist
economies public health infrastructure has deteriorated and cannot
actually stand the peak of the pandemic, unless measures to reduce the
rate of its expansion are taken.

One might say that contra Agamben, ‘naked life’ would be closer
to the pensioner on a waiting list for a respirator or an ICU bed,
because of a collapsed health system, than the intellectual having to
do with the practicalities of quarantine measures.

In light of the above I would like to suggest a different return
to Foucault. I think that sometimes we forget that Foucault had a
highly relational conception of power practices. In this sense, it is
legitimate to pose a question whether a democratic or even communist
biopolitics is possible.

To put this question in a different way: Is it possible to have
collective practices that actually help the health of populations,
including large-scale behaviour modifications, without a parallel
expansion of forms of coercion and surveillance?

Foucault himself, in his late work, points towards such a direction,
around the notions of truth, parrhesia and care of the self. In this
highly original dialogue with ancient philosophy, he suggested an
alternative politics of bios that combines individual and collective
care in non coercive ways.

In such a perspective, the decisions for the reduction of movement
and for social distancing in times of epidemics, or for not
smoking in closed public spaces, or for avoiding individual and
collective practices that harm the environment would be the result of
democratically discussed collective decisions. This means that from
simple discipline we move to responsibility, in regards to others
and then ourselves, and from suspending sociality to consciously
transforming it. In such a condition, instead of a permanent
individualized fear, which can break down any sense of social
cohesion, we move to the idea of collective effort, coordination and
solidarity within a common struggle, elements that in such health
emergencies can be equally important to medical interventions.

This offers the possibility of a democratic biopolitics. This can also
be based on the democratization of knowledge. The increased access
to knowledge, along with the need for popularization campaigns makes
possible collective decision processes that are based on knowledge and
understanding and not just the authority of experts.

__Biopolitics from below

The battle against HIV, the fight of stigma, the attempt to make
people understand that it is not the disease of ‘high risk
groups’, the demand for education on safe sex practices, the funding
of the development of therapeutic measures and the access to public
health services, would not have been possible without the struggle
of movements such as ACT UP. One might say that this was indeed an
example of a biopolitics from below.

And in the current conjuncture, social movements have a lot of room to
act. They can ask of immediate measures to help public health systems
withstand the extra burden caused by the pandemic. They can point to
the need for solidarity and collective self-organization during such
a crisis, in contrast to individualized “survivalist” panics.
They can insist on state power (and coercion) being used to channel
resources from the private sector to socially necessary directions.
And they can demand social change as a life-saving exigency.

Panagiotis Sotiris is an adjunct faculty member of the Hellenic Open
University and editorial board member of the Historical Materialism
Journal.

Reposted from https://lastingfuture.blogspot.com/ with author’s permission.




#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: