In early 2020, the critical theorist and philosopher Giorgio Agamben wrote a series of essays attacking the measures adopted to contain the spread of the coronavirus in his homeland of Italy, the first country in the West to impose lockdowns. The virus, Agamben asserted, was a mere pretext for the imposition of “techno-medical despotism.” Two decades earlier, Agamben issued similar criticisms of the post-9/11 security state, making him an intellectual hero to the Left. His COVID-19 interventions, in contrast, turned him into a pariah among most former allies.
Agamben’s marginalization was just one indication that historically left-aligned critical theory might be at odds with the contemporary Left’s veneration of scientific expertise and technocratic rule. The notion of “biopolitics,” central to the work of Agamben and his predecessor Michel Foucault, describes the modern reorientation of power toward the management of biological life. This shift, they argue, is evident in the state’s growing involvement in measuring, protecting, and optimizing the health of the population it governs. Agamben, as with other thinkers influenced by Foucault, has largely treated biopolitics as something to be resisted. Lately, this notion has become unfashionable, as most of the Western Left has embraced draconian COVID-19 restrictions.
Benjamin Bratton’s new book Revenge of the Real is the first substantial effort to date to re-imagine Foucault’s ideas on biopolitics in a manner more congenial to medical technocracy. Bratton accepts the philosopher’s historical account of the emergence of biopolitics, but he does not regard this new mode of power as objectionable per se. On the contrary, he treats his predecessors’ hostility to it as an indication of retrograde tendencies of their work: knee-jerk technophobia and hostility to all forms of authority, rationality, and control. He sees these attitudes as rooted in the expressive individualism and puerile antinomianism of 1968. His book claims to offer a revised biopolitical analysis free of the prejudices of “boomer theory.”
In opposition to Agamben, Bratton outlines a theoretical justification for a regime of rational technocratic management that could, he argues, respond effectively to emergent crises: not just the pandemics that global integration has made inevitable but also the looming threat of climate change. At the core of his case is a vision of “positive biopolitics” that would remedy the failures of governance that were exposed by the coronavirus at local, national, and global levels. Bratton’s proposals proceed from the premise that an “epidemiological model of society is foundational for a viable post-pandemic politics.” The implication of this model, he says, is “to see oneself more as a node in a biopolitical network … than as an autonomous individual.”
There are two arguments at work here, one more controversial than the other. A broad array of readers would accept Bratton’s assessment that the pandemic has revealed the need for more competent, agile governance structures in the West, as well as major improvements to international coordination around infectious disease response. But the suggestion that the “epidemiological model of society” should guide politics will, and should, raise eyebrows.
Glossing Foucault, Bratton notes that the “epidemiological mode shifts the final authority from the declaration of the sovereign to the expert administration of life and death.” In other words, Foucault claimed that biopolitics emerged from the decline, in the 18th and 19th centuries, of absolute monarchy and the simultaneous emergence of rationalized bureaucracies staffed with credentialed experts. In the political conflicts of the present, Bratton sees these forces in tension once again, with populist strongmen who posit themselves as quasi-monarchical embodiments of the nation spearheading a reactionary resistance against the rule of experts.
The only antagonist of the epidemiological politics Bratton acknowledges, then, is the “populist return to sovereign power” he identifies with figures such as former President Donald Trump and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. He dismisses the “orthodox biopolitical critique” exemplified by Agamben in part by asserting that it is “aligned with the populist Right.” But what if the objection to expert administration is not a preference for what Bratton calls the “national autocrat’s symbolic prestige” but a concern that technocracy contradicts the principle of popular sovereignty that underpins modern democracy?
Foucault identified this tension as a key problem raised by biopolitical governance, but Bratton seems unperturbed by it (the word “democracy” appears only once in the book). Given this indifference, it’s not surprising that Bratton regards any political obstacles to epidemiological hegemony as mere distractions and lumps all who resist it into the same basket of deplorables. “From 5G conspiracy theories to mask protests to self-destructive super-spreader events that keep the economy on lockdown, the disconnect between rational policy and what people think and do is dangerously pronounced,” he writes. Exercising basic freedoms of expression and assembly, he implies, is now as irrational as believing a bizarre conspiracy theory.
It’s also notable that Bratton blames those exercising these rights for “keep[ing] the economy on lockdown,” rather than the experts and officials who rapidly embraced that questionable policy in early 2020, overturning much of the prior public health consensus. In this sense, he makes average citizens responsible for the continuation of the crisis. Along the same lines, Bratton seems to endorse the online demonization of so-called Karens as the supposed agents of the antisocial values that have contributed to the pandemic’s spread.
The irony is that Bratton’s style of rhetoric turns public attention away from failures of governance, which are ostensibly his guiding concern, and toward the moral condemnation of individuals, generally those belonging to the enemy political faction. In other words, the excoriation of “Karens” and motorcycle rally attendees, rather than enabling an empirical examination of effective and ineffective state responses to the virus, tends to convert it into a new opportunity for blame games that play out on predictable partisan lines.
This moralizing rhetoric may well be an inevitable corollary of the “epidemiological model of society,” which conditions us to view our fellow citizens above all as vectors of disease. Bratton argues more hopefully that by viewing ourselves as biologically intertwined, we will develop new forms of solidarity, but the evidence of the past year suggests the opposite. COVID-19 has heightened the atmosphere of rage, suspicion, and hostility that prevailed in the Trump era. In this sense, rather than inaugurating a new era of epidemiological enlightenment, the pandemic has perpetuated fears shaped by earlier crises, from AIDS and crack to 9/11.
Partisan polarization around the virus appears to be a uniquely serious problem in the United States. More effective crisis responses are unlikely to emerge amid these antagonisms, stoked by a media whose business model relies on an escalating demonization of political enemies. This predicament is surely the root of many of the failures of our pandemic response. A glib denial of empirical evidence about the virus and vaccines has had disastrous effects, as Bratton argues, but the flip side of this trend is the embrace of partisan imperatives by scientists and health officials with large platforms, which has done serious damage to the credibility of their institutions.
In a discussion of the debates about masks, Bratton accuses those who reject masking of a “disavowal of the real.” Yet for someone who claims to offer a politics grounded in the empirical, he is oblivious to the ambiguous evidence about the efficacy of masks and particularly of mask mandates. Furthermore, while the book is punctuated with remarks about countries with more or less successful pandemic policies, he offers little detailed parsing of what these look like and no consideration of the fact that the jury is still out: Numerous countries and states praised for their successful containment have experienced large outbreaks, while some initially condemned have fared better recently.
Bratton is effective at revealing some of the weaknesses of the “boomer theory” he associates with Agamben — particularly its tendency to stigmatize all rational administration as oppressive. On the other hand, his need to score as many points as possible at the expense of the standard enemies of the Left, from Trump on down, makes much of the book read like a tendentious partisan screed. If he were more interested in engaging with the uncertain evidence about policies and impacts, his case for a positive biopolitics might ground a more scrupulous and even-handed analysis of the broad, cross-partisan governance failures the pandemic has exposed.
Geoff Shullenberger is a writer and academic. He blogs at outsidertheory.com. Follow him on Twitter: @daily_barbarian.
