I would like to address 3 aspects of governance practices that have become very clear during the Covid pandemic.
Biopolitics
State of exception
Science as religion
All three undoubtedly existed before the pandemic, but unfolded in full during the pandemic. I also believe that they will be pillars of the structure of our societies in the future.
Even though I will deal with the three topics separately one after the other, they naturally intertwine, need each other and follow on from each other.
Biopolitics
Biopolitics understood as the administration and regulation of the population’s life processes.
Already described by Foucault in the 1980s, it was no longer just subliminal, latently perceptible during the pandemic, but emerged clearly, for all to see, one would think. Leading narratives that make it clear were „How do you manage to let as few people die as efficiently as possible?“ „Which people are „systemically relevant“?“ „How do as few people as possible meet?“ „Which people are vulnerable in the anatomical sense in terms of preserving their survival?“
If we assume that biopolitics is a key pillar in the shaping of modern societies, this also means that politics no longer begins where society is organised beyond the necessities of life (ancient understanding of politics), but rather politics becomes that which has direct access to the organisation of life (as survival). Politics is merely the administration and maintenance of bodies as economic material.
This also means that good life and bad life are differentiated into healthy and unhealthy life. Life is now only understood in a biological sense. It has also become clear that this understanding was already deeply rooted in people’s minds before the pandemic. The slogan (of the German left) „Fighting for the good life for all“ has proven to be a mere phrase. The narrative of the protection guaranteed by the vaccine to protect the life of my neighbour was adopted unquestioningly. The fact that #StayAtHome, doing nothing and switching off what distinguishes life from survival, has been practised and preached so often by the population, shows how deeply this purely biological understanding of life is already ingrained.
The fact that many, especially middle-class people, have perceived the lockdown as a break from what they say is a stressful life also shows how many of them are effectively just surviving and don’t have much else.
During the Covid pandemic, the battle for every body was fought harder by the state than it had been for a long time. The most absurd incentives or bans were used to persuade people to get vaccinated (bratwurst for the vaccination, access to public transport). Everyone was approached personally in a mediated way. Via a doctor, a neighbour, poster propaganda or access restrictions.
However, the preservation of pure survival also goes hand in hand with the management of death. This also became very visible during the pandemic, even though it has long been part of everyday life in some parts of the world. Many people in retirement homes or in countries of the South (El Salvador in the prisons, South Africa in the townships, Brazil in the favelas) have been locked up and left to die. Biopolitics therefore always means necropolitics.
When the highest political doctrine is to manage pure survival or death, the right means are needed to enforce this.
The Conspiracy Manifesto states that biopolitics logically leads to a state of exception.
State of exception
A state of exception understood as the suspension of law and democracy, with the declared aim of restoring them, always goes hand in hand with administration or authoritarian governance, as power is shifted to the executive. Governing by decree, without parliament, without or only with limited legislative procedures.
Even though a state of exception was never officially declared in Germany during the pandemic, the actions of politics cannot be described in any other way. The protective measures were all decided by ordinance, decrees and general decrees bypassing parliament, and decisions were made by experts, commissions or crisis teams. The term „state of exception“ was replaced by the term „epidemic situation of national importance“.
An increase in governance by these means has been observed for some time, particularly in the fight against terrorism. However, it cannot be denied that such a large-scale and simultaneous global suspension of the law was new.
However, since we are not known to be the greatest friends of bourgeois democracy, the question arises as to why governing in a state of exception is a problem for us. It is more akin to absolutism, even if this is not its historical origin. But the ruler remains the ruler. Whether we are fighting against a king or against a capitalist bourgeois democracy. So does the declaration of a state of exception merely serve to pose the question of how to fight?
No, governing in a state of exception rather shows an intensification and deepening of rule that closes any space for something completely different, such as, for example and above all, in the administration and the attack on the body at all costs. As the pandemic has shown. For us, this means that everything that enables revolutionary thinking and struggle tends to be made impossible.
The declared protected good in the pandemic was life. Pure life. It is fitting that Agamben also describes the state of exception as the cancellation of life in the name of life.
Everything that could be described as living was prohibited. Socialising, singing together, celebrating, protesting, but also saying goodbye or celebrating faith.
If we approach the concept of a state of exception from the perspective of everyday life, it means the absence of normality, a state that one does not want to be in. This includes the fact that the state of exception must be about restoring normality.
In times of the pandemic, the declared aim of all measures and policies was to restore normality.
Thus, in times of the pandemic, the aim of those in power was to ensure normality, in the sense of everyday capitalist life, by all means, more visible than it has been for a long time. The will of many people to contribute to the „restoration“ of this normality was probably one of the hardest things to bear during the pandemic.
To justify a state of exception, you need a trigger – a reason.
Historically, this was the state of siege, i.e. a link to war and insurrection. After the First World War at the latest, however, economic crises were increasingly used, then terror, now climate and again war. And these states of emergency are linked in interesting ways, so that, for example, the state of exception for war is also one of climate, or is made to be.
We can observe how more and more events are being used to legitimise a state of exception, bringing us ever closer to a permanent state of exception, even if its permanence has not yet been determined.
But this means that those in power are making us/people fight more and more for a normality that we reject.
According to Benjamin, it could therefore help to understand „normality“ as a state of exception:
„The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the state of exception in which we live is the rule.“
and to fight to bring about the real state of exception, which abolishes both normality and the prevailing state of exception.
The fact that science as an ideology factory underpins the state of exception and its biopolitics is also nothing new, but it takes on a different quality that makes it worth thinking again about science as religion.
Science as religion
If we assume that the pandemic in particular was about the management of lives and bodies, we cannot avoid talking about medicine. Medicine was the leading „science“ in times of Covid. Medicine understood as modern technology used to ensure survival and prolong it as much as possible. The emergence of modern medicine is deeply linked to the beginnings of capitalist modernity, its specific form of separation of body and mind and the objectification of bodies.
There is no other explanation for the fact that medical discourse in times of the pandemic mainly revolved around numbers, statistics and values. A calculated average value determined whether I was allowed to visit my grandmother, whether children could go to school and whether people were categorised as sick or healthy.
Science means natural and social science orientated towards mathematical models and calculations. The problem with bourgeois science has always been that it does not make its own epistemological foundations transparent, and perhaps no longer even knows them, and is therefore part of domination and oppression. Religion not in the sense of an irrational cult, but that it is given the highest priority. The ultimate fulfilment of human needs and desires is hoped from them. But even more importantly, this form of science lays claim to the only valid interpretation of the world. Religion is described as a coherent system with an interpretation of the world with dogmas, which is also organised around fixed rituals, the central point of which is a promise of salvation, and the fact that science claims to be the only valid interpretation of the world can be seen in the discourses from the pandemic described above. Anyone who dared to put forward a non-quantifiable argument against the measures was excluded from the discourse as irrational, unbelieving and naive. Anyone who relied on their own and personal experience was hardly able to find anyone to talk to. However, this pattern is also evident in the debate on climate change and its quantifiability.
Science’s promise of salvation lies in the present. It promises an understanding and contradiction-free categorisation of events in the world in tables and categories. Alternatives are inconceivable because there are no figures to back them up. This makes a world that does not yet exist unthinkable. Everything can only be thought and argued on the basis of what already exists. Projections attempt to describe the future in the here and now and are thus inevitably realised, as they represent an extension of the here and now. Science as a religion is therefore a religion of servitude, not of liberation. The idea of a better world does not and cannot exist in it.
The problem is therefore not, that science has become religion, but that it is an oppresive and subjugating religion.