Preamble to the early 2022 version: This text was written in 2020 and published, during 2020 and 2021, on various cybernetic platforms. As such, it precedes the release of the vaccines and correlated biopolitical deployments. However, in this revised version, I have decided to intervene very sparsely on the original text, adding only a few paragraphs that succinctly analyse the more recent transformation of the biopolitical field. Leaving the text almost as it was initially written will, I hope, verify its relevance as a general description of this biopolitical field; and, also, give us a vague measure of how far we have come in terms of normalising and internalising the dense control mechanisms deployed by the State.

 

Rather than being a comment on the adequacy – or not – of the quarantine measures imposed by the State, which is a whole different discussion, this is a comment on biopolitical governing techniques and on the behaviour of the “population” during this period that authorities managed to define as a “global health emergency”. The manners in which we react in such moments are symptomatic, I think, of the current order’s functioning.

 

Succinct notes on biopolitics

> The function of a control dispositif is to make sure that “nothing really happens” in the sense of preventing or eliminating the irruption of unpredictable, rebellious or antagonistic realities within the confines of official reality (which reality is itself modelled by the very same control dispositifs).

> We could define the distinctive control techniques of European modernity as “biopolitics” that is, as the creation of a capillary network of power relations that has as object the ruling of “life” (“bios”). “Ruling life” can take various forms: it could mean the control of the health, reproduction, demographics, nutrition and epidemiology of the subjects; or the shaping and control of their intimate practices, desires, enjoyment and imagination.

> In the Western world, biopower usually acts through seduction, manipulation, incitement, guidance or channelling, for example through techniques like therapy, counselling or education, rather than through direct coercion. A successful dispositif of biopower does not force you to take a certain path, but convinces you that this is the only desirable or, even, the only possible path you can take. But of course, modern biopolitics can also lock you in a concentration camp and dispose of you as they please.

> Biopolitical discourse is always the same: the authorities are taking all necessary measures to contain threats to health[1]: the “contagious” (to be confined), the “degenerate” (to be eliminated), the “primitive” (to be educated and/or integrated), the subversive/ungovernable (to be co-opted, integrated, confined, isolated or eliminated). And whatever the State considers as its enemy is represented as an illness (infection, plague, cancer, pest, etc.) that attacks the body of the Nation. This means that, whenever “biopolitical modernity” enacts oppression, exclusion, discrimination, apartheid, incarceration, terror, war, torture, genocide and so on, it justifies it as an act meant to preserve the health and well-being of the Nation or population. In this way, even the most ruthless governmental measures will be perceived by the loyalist citizens as a neutral and benevolent therapeutic intervention, an act of healing.

> One of the main fears in bourgeois modernity is that of “contagion”: the contagion of our “natural” sex/gender by the “opposite” sex/gender (“real men’s” effemination, “real women’s” masculinising); of our “normal” sexuality by “abnormal” and “perverted” sexualities; of our culture and civilisation by primitive and barbarian ones; of our Nation by foreigners; of our private space by other people; of our rationality and our truths by irrationality, uncertainty and ambivalence; and, of course, of our health by various pathologies.

> Within the – by now global – biopolitical dispositif of power, confinement is one of the main instruments of governing: the threat to the health of the Nation has to be isolated. The Nazis create concentration and extermination camps to eliminate the Jewish population, which they define as the pest infecting the body of the Aryan Nation; the Israeli State enacts a system of apartheid and terror to confine the Palestinians, which they define as a threat to the health of the Nation. The European States “secure the borders” to keep out the migrants which they also define as a threat to the health of the Nation; the USA does the same to keep out the Mexicans, which they define as an infection to the Nation… and so on, you can find a myriad of examples.

> The majority of the Western population has been sunk into a state of infantilism. By being infantilised I mean being made completely dependant on the will, guidance and resources of someone else (in the case of children[2], for example, dependent on the family, on educators or on the State); while at the same time perceiving the discipline and control that these authorities enact as normal, as a good, as a privilege, as a right, as freedom or as love.

> “Crisis” is the favourite new tool of biopolitics: kept in a perpetual state of crisis, the infantilised population will do anything to “save their lives”.

> In times of biopolitical crisis, like the “pandemic emergency” we are living, the fascists, who get themselves excited with biopolitical fantasises of genocide and “cleansing” at the best of times, are having a ball. The fascist leaders compare migrants to the coronavirus; the news blurt that migrants bring over the infection; all sorts of brutality are justified through public health discourses, and so on.

> The more docile one is, the more aggressively they will embrace egotism and fascism in times of crisis: terrorised by their own helplessness, the loyal citizen starts looking for a scapegoat, for someone on which to project their self-despise. This can be, for example, one of the classical others of modernity: women, migrants, “non-whites”, “homosexuals”, etc.’. In our 2020 case of “biopolitical State terror”, the scapegoats are “the infected”, “the asymptomatic positives”, “those that do not obey the quarantine and put all of us to risk” and so on. While during the spring of 2021, the State and media have created a much more efficient instrument for the adaptation and further deployment of governmental dispositifs: the figure of the non-vaccinated, a new and odious other blamed for society’s pathology[3].

A few thoughts on what’s going on now

> Once a deadly and hideous enemy – the virus – was finally found, the Italian State took the opportunity to flex some muscle and reinstate its function as Father of the Nation that will save all its children but also discipline them if necessary – for their own good, of course. The solemn and heroic rhetoric of war propaganda was resuscitated to pump some patriotism in the calcified veins of the Nation: “Italy suffers! Italy makes sacrifices! Italy stands together! Italy fights! We shall prevail!”

> In liberal-capitalism, war functions as an extremely efficient remedy for blockages, be they symbolic, of legitimacy, economic or of any other nature (isn’t any capitalist crisis actually a symbolic one?). The current mobilising of wartime rhetoric and governing techniques, thus, is not random – this biopolitical “crisis” comes at the right moment to galvanise a Western European bourgeois system plagued by chronic constipation in all its aspects. To give a very simple example, the contemporary deployment of a batch of “recovery/stimulus packages” is a revamping of the post-WWII strategy of “Marshall recovery plans”.

> The State extends the technique of confinement to the entire population and emanates a plethora of administrative measures that try to control what we can do, say and think. We are assured that the impositions, decided by cliques of politicians and “men of law” and supported by the semi-divine authority of the biomedical cast are the only way to save the health of the population and, why not, the world.

> Most of the loyal citizens applaud the draconian measures and some ask for increased severity; they wait, full of hope, for salvation to come from above; and assault the pharmacies and supermarkets in a race for a “survival of the fittest consumer”. The most that they request is a return to “normality”, to the power relations of “before the epidemic” that now seem to represent absolute freedom.

> Typically, the media overflows with calls to “social responsibility” that cannot sound but hypocritical, coming as they are from the overfed, over-privileged population of affluent Europe that, in their daily life, exhibit the crassest indifference in regards to the lives of other people and to how their own daily practices feed the various global dispositifs of exclusion, immiseration and destruction. The model of the “responsible citizen” that they summon up is one of the typical figures of fascist citizenry: either the “innocent citizen” that dutifully obeys or the “policewoman citizen” that helps the authorities in their control effort.

> It seems that the loyal citizens enjoy[4], in a perverse way, this end of the world paranoia; finally some excitement, some tragedy in our insipid lives, the sense of being part of something important! This exacerbation of the Spectacle in biopolitical key excites everyone to no little amount and they engage with glee in passionate discussions about the epidemic; in policing the others; and in re-tracing in their own lives the logic and barbed wire perimeters of the concentration camp.

> All this biopolitical deployment functions as a control dispositif: it gives another erection to the, by now rather flaccid, pillars of bourgeois order, imposing them as sacrosanct certainties and indisputable moral principles. In other words, I think that the main result of this biopolitical crisis is the new consensus that bourgeois reality is the only one possible and that the State, para-State or corporate institutions are the only entities capable of managing it properly. Some of these recent “infection containment” measures, implicitly or explicitly, proclaim that:

•  People are incapable of managing their own realities that is, incapable of living autonomously; thus, authorities – political, administrative, biomedical, military, corporate, media, educational – have the right and duty to take charge of the situation, using whatever means they decide are adequate.
•  The duty and responsibility of a “good citizen” is to obey. Disobeying the control measures represents a “threat to society”, puts at risk “our health and way of life” and has to be immediately repressed.
•  Reinforcing the senile pronouncements of classical liberal political philosophy, the only spaces decreed safe for the citizen are the confines of the property that they possess or rent; the workspace (which often nowadays merges with the home); or the space of consumption (the supermarket, the mall, etc.); while our salvation lies in isolation, in thinking only about oneself and one’s family and in treating everyone else as a threat (internalization of “social distancing”). According to the same decrees, the only “healthy” social relations are those within the nuclear bourgeois family; or, work related. The group, the collective and any form of self-organising that does not fall under the categories approved by authorities as representative of “civil society” are a threat to the wellbeing of society, a foci of infection.
• The main objectives in life are “security” and “comfort”: the “security” insured by authorities and the law; and the “comfort” provided by the capitalist circuits of work-consumption-leisure. As such, the most desirable things in life can only be obtained by obeying the rules of official reality. Restrictions, punishments and controls are a form of protecting our privileges as metropolitan citizens.
• In the official imagination, the citizen’s “safe space” is moulded after the cell space in the carceral economy. The citizen is submitted to constant surveillance with the purpose of instilling self-discipline, while the terrain of their life is thoroughly colonised by a thick network of control measures, modulated according to the governor’s purposes. Just think, for example, of the extent to which instruments of control like the “red/yellow/green zone” or the “green pass” shape, in manners that turn citizen’s reactions into automatisms devoid of any critical analysis, the thoughts, practices, imagination and habitus of said citizens. The only “autonomous” space allowed by this network of control is that of a series of (false) “free choices”, usually between two possibilities presented by the various governing authorities. Obviously, such “choices” never transgress the most conservative coordinates of the dominant reality; on the contrary, they are so devised that, whatever option you choose, the dominant reality will be reinforced as a result. However, since this risible notion of freedom as “free choice” represents the grain on which rests the entire scaffolding of “liberal democracy”, the various authorities usually try not to impose the proper choice. Instead, they deploy dispositifs that guide the citizen towards the choice aligned with the governmental goals and worldview. In our case, the vaccine works as the “free choice” and the green pass as one of the control instruments that try push the citizens into making the proper choice in relation to the vaccine (although more recently some European Nation-States, for example Austria and Italy, got fed up with such subterfuges and made the vaccine compulsory). Bourgeois freedom is this: a handful of artificial islands of “free choice” in an ocean of dispositifs of control; a comprehensive layout of small, comfortable prison cells.

> This consolidation of the pillars of liberal “freedom” stimulates a further move towards a fascist model of social organisation where the “public good” means control, “responsibility” means obedience and “solidarity” means defending the Fatherland/Motherland against threats. Thus, biopolitical absolutism is seamlessly installed where before “soft” biopolitics were ruling, reminding me of the typical European oscillation between “liberalism” and “fascism”, which the bourgeois order tries to convince us are antagonists but which, in fact, are two synergic aspects of a modern governing that initiates its crusade for the “liberty and equality (of white well-off males)” with colonial and domestic massacres and that has continued in the same vein until today.

> So many around us have turned to the authorities – State, medical caste, police, corporations, etc. – for guidance and salvation. So many have, with paranoid excitement, adopted the dominant version of reality and turned into relays of power, into channels through which the dominant discourses circulate. They stare feverishly at their screens, repeating like parrots the official mantras and rituals: “coronavirus characteristics, morbidity, mortality, incidence, virulence, symptomatology, prevention, protection, sanitation, safety measures, self-quarantine, tampon, vaccine, do this, avoid that… Italy, the economy, the growth/fall, the GDP, work, debt, subsidies, emergency financial packages…” All other realities have been engulfed by this official reality that pours epidemiological data and shouts orders. Our swift transformation into ventriloquist’s puppets signals our continuing dependence on the guidance of the parental voice and gaze.

> As if afflicted by a, strangely convenient, form of selective amnesia, most of the Italian (and indeed, most of the other European) leftist collectives self-presented as “radical”, “anti-capitalist”, “anti-system” or “anti-authoritarian” have forgotten how imperial control operates. Utterly confused and startled by a political field in which a majority of the voices and bodies opposing the deployment of control dispositifs are fascists of one sort or another, those leftist collectives did not find any other line of action but dissociating themselves from fascism by enthusiastically and energetically aligning themselves with the (“medical-industrial”) governmental directives. Their cries where all grouped under the banner “I believe in Science, Order and Progress! I am a responsible citizen! I protect the public good!”. Knee-jerk reaction, the blurring of analytical vision by fear and paranoia, or an exhibition of true colours? Who cares? What is clear is that the only critique advanced by such groups, the tired and complacent saviour mantra – “The State did not take care properly of the population! Some vulnerable groups have been excluded or neglected! The health system is under-funded! etc.” – could well have been uttered by a religious charity, by an official administrator of the welfare State, by an NGO with a “social mission”, by a corporation with “social responsibility” vocation, by any union, by a nationalist organisation or by a social-democratic filo-capitalist. Which suggests that such “radical”, “anti-authoritarian” and “anti-system” groups have literally cancelled their reason for existing.

> A small detour related to the previous paragraph: up to some years ago, everyone was deploring the dismantling of the welfare State and the privatising of “public resources” at the hands of neo-liberals. Well, welcome to the latest neo-vintage era of the bourgeois order: authoritarian Statism. The State is back, omnipresent, caring and intransigent, just like in its fascist heyday.

> And, in a tragically comic twist, the words “liberty”, “autonomy”[5] and even the liberal perennial favourite, “rights”, are now used exclusively by conservatives, the right and the motley assortment of fascists composing the “anti-vaccine” contingent. The left now talks about “protection”, “safety”, “care”, “cure” and the “public good”, a vocabulary traditionally associated with conservatism. As such, just like in pre-WWII Europe, the initiative in the struggle against governing measures is in the hands of the fascists, the only ones that deploy an antagonistic discourse. Scary indeed.

However: for the handful of people that refuse to let their imagination be colonised by the hypnotic mechanisms of biopolitical control and that, rather than enjoying obedience, continue to think of how to escape the concentration camps of liberal democracy, those are the right moments for assessing the form and strength of our autonomy and to trace, while walking, our new paths.

Notes:

[1] In the modern Statist discourse, a variety of things can be defined as “health of the Nation”: not just “public health” but also “ the economy”, “our prosperity”, “ our culture and values”, “the social tissue”, “our institutions”, “the social order”, “peace”, “our security” and so on, a whole string of vacuous terms that cover the mercilessness of authority. In this manner, any challenge to the current order can be defined as a threat to “our health”, as “bioterrorism”.

[2] Children are not infantile per se, but the bourgeois order has put in place an inescapable network of mechanisms and institutions to force infantilise them. I am referring to the gigantic “dispositif of the child” which, from the more abstract fantasies of children’s purity, innocence and “naturalness” to children’s toys and films, from developmental psychology to materials on proper parenting and from educational institutions to legal codes, regulates not only the Western ideology of the child but also the subjectivity of parents and children. This ideology’s contradictions are interesting: for example, children are defined by the liberal law as unable to make rational choices, as incapable of autonomy and as dependent on the resources and experience of adult experts (hence children’s lack of legal responsibility, the requirement of an adult custodian, censorship, legal age, age of consent, etc.); and at the same time, this same Western ideology tries to convince everyone that children should be free, autonomous, able to make their own decisions, etc.

[3] “Pathology” is the signifier that currently replaces the term “degeneracy” so loved by fascist discourses.

[4] I use “enjoyment” in the way some psycho-analytical texts do, to indicate a form of “libidinal intensity” or “excitement” which, while ritualistic and addictive, does not have to be either pleasant or fully conscious. Enjoyment, in my opinion, is closely governed by control dispositifs, this form of control being in fact the major governmental innovation of the past two centuries.

[5] Not that “freedom” and “autonomy” are uncontroversial terms, on the contrary, they make sense only in a specific context and are always associated with power relations. As such, they should be used with caution at the best of times. However, I am just signaling here the loss of some foundational terms used by older struggles for emancipation.