Revitalising biopower in the context of COVID-19 : biopolitics against a state of exception

Abstract

When the World Health Organisation (WHO) first declared the Covid-19 crisis a global pandemic, an unprecedented experiment in both the management of population groups and crisis situations followed. Within their attempts at mass biosocial coordination geared towards mitigating the pandemic’s consequences, nation states around the world developed policy responses that, in many instances, reflected a shift in their particular citizen-state relationships. As nation states were forced to choose between preserving public health on the one hand and protecting their economies and democratic principles on the other hand, the question remains how to interpret these interventions and shifts in citizen-state relationships. This dissertation responds to a current in social intellectual thought that emerged at the beginning of the pandemic, and which drew on an Agambean biopolitics to frame the pandemic as a politically manufactured crisis to legitimate the institutionalisation of a ‘state of exception’ allowing for an unjust extension of state powers.

Rather, this dissertation is formulated against the grain of a ‘state of exception’. It argues that any biopolitics which unequivocally assumes the function and form of state interventions prior to an analysis of its local instantiations cannot be fruitful. Contextual factors such as a country’s position in the world economy, available resources and infrastructure, internal politics, and international relations differentially shaped the biopolitical outcomes experienced by respective nation states. A conceptualisation of biopolitics sensitive to difference is needed to better theorise ‘biopolitical inclusion’ – how citizens are included in the ‘make live’ policies of the state – as well as any subsequent changes to the citizen-state relationship. Furthermore, this dissertation is written in full acknowledgement of the fact that the prevailing conceptualisations of biopolitics put forward by prominent scholars such as Michel Foucault have been largely excised from their conditions of emergence in their exclusion of the roles of colonialism and imperialism in the formation of the modern biopolitical nation state. As such, the dissertation deploys a poststructuralist method and conducts a genealogy applied to a South African biopolitics in order to ascertain conceptualisations of biopolitics better suited to local contexts and which can better understand shifts in the citizen-state relationships in particular.

Keywords: Biopolitics; state of exception; South Africa; genealogy