The Academic Left is divided right now over the appropriate role of theoretical critique and “resistance” within the context of a global pandemic.
The most divisive figure in this debate is Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, whose critique of the use of emergency measures to control the spread of COVID-19 over the last 18 months has been something of a scandal.
Agamben has claimed that global COVID-19 responses have led to a form of “techno-medical despotism” which the public have too easily accommodated out of fear in order to preserve merely “bare life”. He opposes masks, viewing them as destructive of civic connection and participation, writing:
A country that decides to renounce its own face, to cover the faces of its own citizens with masks everywhere is, then, a country that has erased every political dimension from itself.
For Agamben, the use of a “state of exemption” - a phrase which he has championed throughout his life- has been crafted throughout the crisis in service of an ever expanding biopolitical state. For Agambem, paranoia has stripped us not merely of civil rights but also our soul:
It is legitimate to ask if such a society can still define itself as human, or if the loss of sensible relationships, of the face, of friendship, of love, can truly be compensated for by an abstract and presumably absolutely fictitious health security.
For many, myself included, this kind of theoretical critique sounds… well, a bit nutty. Despite his claims otherwise, there does seem to a fair degree of denialism at the heart of Agamben’s critique. In his view, the harms of COVID-19 have been greatly exaggerated, something actual reality doesn’t support.
The kind of conspiracy theory Agamben is concocting also doesn’t make much sense. As Slavoj Žižek noted in his book “Pandemic!” the crisis generated by COVID-19 does very little to serve the interests of global elites:
[W]hy would state power be interested in promoting such a panic which is accompanied by distrust in state power and which disturbs the smooth reproduction of capital? Is it really in the interest of capital and state power to trigger a global economic crisis in order to renovate its reign?
In a much more in-depth reply to Agamben, Benjamin Bratton in his book The Revenge of The Real, notes that lofty romanticism underpins Agamben’s critique of masks and social distancing and its impact on civil society. Agamben avoids the physical reality of viral transmission, which Bratton believes flips stakes of biopolitical critique:
That our common biological circumstance means we help or harm one another by simply coming in contact is a fact that precedes, and in principle should override, other subject cultural divisions and associations.
Agamben’s critique reflects the worst of both "academic” and “radical political” tendencies - Agamben is too busy crafting a pristine ethical ideal to get his hands dirty with the pragmatic political decisions required in a global crisis.
Nevertheless, I want to argue that Agamben’s sins shouldn’t mean we throw out all considerations of biopolitical critique.
Amongst some sectors of the left, particularly the online left, there does seem to be a tendency to lean heavily on utilitarian justifications for just about any social or political change which occurs in response to the pandemic.
Yesterday, Overland published a bizarre piece from a Contributing Editor to Jacobin, Daniel Lopez, calling on the Australian left to support doubling down on an elimination strategy for the Delta variant in NSW and Victoria, despite little evidence of likely success.
Indeed, calls to extend lockdown measures indefinitely and to heavily police public health orders in Australia have almost exclusively come from left-wing commentators, who often rely on academic justifications for their views.
We are being told by these “progressive” talking heads, that the reduction of transmission and deaths in Australia is the only social goal worth pursuing, and that we should get used to “the new normal” of COVID-19, rather than resisting state excess.
As I’ve written about before, we shouldn’t view public health orders as inherently authoritarian. However, this only holds true if measures are reasonable and proportionate to our present circumstances.
Emergency measures which drastically impact the lives of Australians require significant justification and should not be tied to goals (like elimination) which are practically unfeasible. They also need to consider the broader changes brought about by continuously maintaining a state of emergency.
Philosopher and writer Nina Power, drawing on both Agamben and Catholic philosopher Ivan Illich, has highlighted some of the very real concerns about framing current pandemic changes as “the new normal”.
Power writes how the current state of citizens in most countries is that of a ‘holding pattern’ with no definitive end date in sight:
Individuals all over the world are accepting, albeit with patches of resistance, a fearful, wholly minimised existence – but for how much longer? Fear makes thinking harder than ever – ‘fear precedes and forestalls knowledge and reflection’ – yet there is an urgent need to think, and to question every aspect of our current situation: where are we now, indeed?
This holding pattern is leading to certain troubling cultural changes.
Regrettably, the pandemic appears to have exacerbated trends towards further atomisation and a tech-mediation of society - trends which Power (and I) see as devastating for humanity.
We are being socially engineered by current conditions to retreat from complex, sometimes difficult, sensual sociality into a seamless and touch-less virtual form of interaction. We are already living in an anxious and introverted age, one which is likely only to get worse during this period of crisis.
As we become alienated from social sensuality, we become more dependent on institutional (particularly medical) therapeutic guidance on how to live.
Powers notes that this trend strips us of the choice to live in a state which Ivan Illich called “conviviality” where ‘modern technologies serve politically interrelated individuals rather than managers’ and where people use ‘responsibly limited tools’.
Instead, we become bound by the conditions of our machines - our means of mediation and the managers of this technology. We also become more reliant on “experts” and other external actors in planning our lives.
The worst outcome of the pandemic would be a world where we are so plagued by “risk” - so much so that we become entirely dependent on state institutions and technology to smooth out our personal interactions. This strips us of an organic life, one we quilt together spontaneously through communion with others.
As Power writes:
Life in the sense used by those who govern us is life in the context of risk, and more importantly, safety. It is not life lived in the sense of a mysterious gift, as an existential project. It is life as a measured, quantitative thing. It may be that ‘life’ is exhausted as a defensive concept, though I continue to believe we must defend ‘life’ as an open, poetic idea against those who would reduce it to an object to be administered and ‘protected’ (particularly when some measures adopted turn out to do more to harm people than to protect them).
This is, at its heart, a biopolitical concern - one that I think is worthy of consideration. Whilst some of this may be slipping into the academic nuttiness of Agamben, it is a variation of biopolitical critique that I think is worth taking seriously.