‚Öffentliches Leben‘: Gesellschaftsdiagnose Covid-19

Hahn, Kornelia; Langenohl, Andreas

doi:10.1007/978-3-658-37440-2_1

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…However, the legitimacy and normative shape of ‘the public’ itself was one of the core aspects at stake in the pandemic, as lockdown measures were met with numerous protests that precisely claimed for themselves those public spaces that the anti-pandemic policies had evacuated. Indeed, the very meaning of ‘public life’ underwent changes through the pandemic (see in the example of Germany, the contributions in Hahn and Langenohl 2022 ). It is the argument of this paper that the protests directed against the anti-pandemic policies, and the violence that accompanied them, were interrelated with governments’ own role as agents of pandemic publicness.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Publicness of Pandemic Security and the Shortcomings of Governmentality

Langenohl

2022

Eur J Secur Res

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Employing the example of Germany within a European context, this paper argues that government responses to the pandemic relied too much on the biopolitical governance of populations, and too little on the symbolic governance of public spheres. Based on an analysis of policy documents and their medial representation, it is found that the politics of pandemic security is focused on the regulation of population aggregates and movements (social distancing, lockdowns, border closings, etc.), resembling a quasi-Foucaultian notion of biopolitical governmentality. Confident that the crisis can be handled through a classical apparatus of security through self-conduct within an imaginary of stochastic aggregation of the social, these modes of governance paid virtually no attention to non-stochastic social aggregates, such as those which can be observed in public spheres. Yet these aggregates produced massive mobilizations against the politics of pandemic governance in liberal democracies, in the streets and on the internet. In conceptual terms, these mobilizations can be understood as an insistence on sovereign power, in Foucault’s sense, yet ‘from below’: They reinvigorate the dramatic public, as opposed to the inconspicuous circulation, as the site for claiming attention, legitimacy, and potentially disruption—in other words, for claiming sovereign power. In the final analysis, a major security problematic can be seen in the failure of the politics of governmentality to be insensitive to the politics of sovereignty.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%