Abstract:The coronavirus pandemic has revived scholarly engagement with the concept of biopolitics, with interpretations diagnosing either the widespread adoption of a classic biopolitical regime or the full‐blown emergence of totalitarian repression (or both of these simultaneously). Relying on a close analysis of different interventions taken by Israeli authorities in response to the pandemic, this article argues that, rather than classic biopolitical strategies, such governmental interventions are better understood … Show more
“…COVID-19 resulted in many participants re-living the hardships of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, while also leveraging their experience to navigate COVID-19. While previous research has demonstrated how uncertainty produces distress (e.g., Author et al, 2020 ; Nettleton, Watt, O’Malley, & Duffey, 2005 ; Timmermans & Buchbinder, 2013 ) and connected the COVID-19 pandemic to such uncertainty (e.g., Lalot, Abrams, & Travaglino, 2021 ; Rabi, Samimian-Darash, & Hilberg, 2022 ), study participants were instead distressed by the familiarity of the pandemic and how it resembled their previous experiences with HIV/AIDS. This finding highlights the importance of psychosocial supports not only during but after a pandemic.…”
“…COVID-19 resulted in many participants re-living the hardships of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, while also leveraging their experience to navigate COVID-19. While previous research has demonstrated how uncertainty produces distress (e.g., Author et al, 2020 ; Nettleton, Watt, O’Malley, & Duffey, 2005 ; Timmermans & Buchbinder, 2013 ) and connected the COVID-19 pandemic to such uncertainty (e.g., Lalot, Abrams, & Travaglino, 2021 ; Rabi, Samimian-Darash, & Hilberg, 2022 ), study participants were instead distressed by the familiarity of the pandemic and how it resembled their previous experiences with HIV/AIDS. This finding highlights the importance of psychosocial supports not only during but after a pandemic.…”
“…In contrast, Rabi et al. (2021) compares Foucault, Agamben and Latour, choosing to emphasise Latour’s (2020) interest in ‘biopolitics’ as a form of statistics‐based management as following Foucault’s interest in population health (against Clover, 2020). It is the state of the nineteenth century and so‐ called biopower … the state of what is rightly called statistics: population management on a territorial grid seen from above and led by the power of experts.…”
Section: Design and Materialitymentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Meanwhile Marks (2021) uses Actor-network theory (Latour, 1987(Latour, , 2005 and Latour read in part through Duff (2016) and partly through Serres and Latour (1995) to help account for emotional distress and its amelioration through bicycle repair. In contrast, Rabi et al (2021) compares Foucault, Agamben and Latour, choosing to emphasise Latour's (2020) interest in 'biopolitics' as a form of statistics-based management as following Foucault's interest in population health (against Clover, 2020).…”
Bruno Latour was a prolific writer and commentator. His work ranged from questioning the status of the scientific fact (Latour & Woolgar, 1979) to considering how Pasteur's work came about (Latour, 1993) to discussing the status of theory and exploring how we come to love technology (Latour, 1996), and then most recently to considering both the law and the environment as 'matters of concern ' (Latour, 2004a) and 'modes of existence ' (Latour, 2011). Although he never published in Sociology of Health and Illness (SHI) himself, his work has been influential in different strands of work across the field and I offer a brief overview of this influence here. Though I look for papers across the journal, I'll make special mention of the small number that cite his name as a keyword to illustrate the argument.
SOCIOTECHNICAL NETWORKS IN ETHNOGRAPHYThe first use of Latour is in a paper by Dodier and Camus (2001) on dealing with patients in a hospital emergency service. They draw on Dingwall and Murray (1983) both to ground their approach and later to talk about the limitations of previous work. For example, they also cite Jeffery (1979) on 'good and bad' patients, but to illustrate their point that 'trivia, drunks, overdoses, tramps-but also nutcases, smelly, dirty, obese patients' are not the same (p. 416). In concluding they suggest that references to specialism vary depending on the closeness of the case to an emergency-depending very much on the relationship of a specific doctor and specific patient-and on the case's intellectual interest (p. 439). Some in emergency services respond to social demands, some do not, so the openness and specialisation of the emergency department is contested (e.g. France is good at mobilising) (Jeffery, 1979). Finally, they note that their ethnographic and comparative work help identify a 'complex web of relationships built up between the people responsible for treatment', (p. 440) which creates the accessibility of services for patients facing alcohol or drug addiction or malarial rash or an infarction. For those who have come to sociology from Foucault, this was a powerful invitation to learn more about the field through Bruno Latour's eyes, using his discussion of 'the discovery of networks' (Latour, 1987).The next use as a keyword is in a paper by Gomart (2002) on addiction-again using an ethnographic method. Gomart cited Latour to support an interest in the setting. Latour, she reminded us that: 'Speaking of her new study on sheep, [Thelma Rowell] stated one of her "biases" in the following way: "I tried to give my sheep the opportunity to behave like chimps, not that I believe that they would be like chimps, but because I am sure that if you take sheep for boring sheep by opposition to intelligent chimps they would not have
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“…it mean[s] to live “in” a state of emergency?’ (Anderson, 2017: 464). Assessing emergency experience becomes a way to understand the new pandemic ‘milieu of actual uncertainty ’ (Rabi et al, 2022: 587, emphasis in original), to ‘anticipate unwanted scenarios and initiate mitigating measures’ (WHO, 2020f: 10), and to gauge the emergence of the pandemic itself.…”
“… 2. The article thus opts for a mode of theorising that follows ‘how specific biopolitical technologies are emerging in response to distinct problems’ (Rabi et al, 2022: 578) to avoid the pitfalls involved in an epochal reading of the Covid-19 pandemic as a grim biopolitical horizon ‘straight out of a Michel Foucault lecture’ (Latour, 2021: S26; for a reading more blatantly bordering on conspiracy thinking see Agamben, 2021). It thus approaches pandemic governance as potentially ‘legitimate but [.…”
The Covid-19 pandemic has made evident that living through a protracted global biopolitical emergency requires new theoretical reflections to make sense of what it means to govern life in a global context. As a central reference in the study of global health in International Relations (IR), biopolitical approaches have privileged a molecular-informational understanding of life as their object of governance. However, the phenomenon of global pandemic fatigue calls for a new problematisation. Experiential biopolitics is proposed here as an approach from which to recognise a limitation of biopolitical emergency governance that has resulted in a generalised feeling of exhaustion among populations subject to prolonged emergency measures. This reformulated biopolitical gaze understands human life, not only as a biological substance, but through its reflexive capacity to nurture lived experience, highlighting the entanglement of pandemic experiences and infection dynamics. The article explores experiential biopolitics through the WHO’s problematisation of pandemic fatigue. It analyses how assessing pandemic experience through behavioural insights studies enables a reflexive visibility of the pandemic event by drawing together biological and experiential variables. Subsequently, it interrogates theories of risk perception as a cornerstone in imagining the pandemic subject as a fundamentally experiential being.
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