Biopolitics After the Pandemic

A Multidisciplinary Conference in Salerno, Italy

10-12 April 2024

The first in our project’s series of collaborative workshops was held in Salerno, Italy, from 10-12 April 2024. These workshops gather sociologists, philosophers, and anthropologists from four continents to examine the pandemic’s effects on global public health.

BIOPOLITICS AFTER THE PANDEMIC?

If we understand biopolitics as a concept that denotes how, in modernity, the biological existence of populations became a central object of power, it is easy to see why this notion is central to analyzing pandemic discourses and policies.

Clearly, the fit with the pandemic is obvious, though our premise is more precisely that the Covid-19 pandemic inaugurated a novel form of biopolitics. In what seemed like a chain reaction of panic and uncertainty, governments around the world made use of pre-existing and newly emerging health (and) data infrastructures in an attempt to curb contagion by limiting people’s movements and opportunities for face-to-face social interaction. Although social distancing and social isolation, governed through bureaucratic practices, are of course not entirely new phenomena, the scale on which they became part of the Covid-19 lexicon and of people’s technologies of the self during the pandemic was unprecedented.

THE WORKSHOP

In this first multidisciplinary workshop, organized by philosopher Davide Tarizzo and anthropologist Federico Scarpelli, we gathered renowned philosophers, anthropologists and sociologists from around the world to reflect on the biopolitical reconfigurations brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, the contributors had already been engaging with biopolitical paradoxes through their own modalities of thought, working on topics like global health, pandemic preparedness, the politics of health governance, postcolonial labor relations and care infrastructures, and more. The Salerno workshop thus kickstarted our wider project by facilitating the sharing of insights on the transformations that the pandemic provoked in the contributors’ disciplinary, thematic, and regional fields of expertise.

The Salerno workshop took a first step towards redefining post-pandemic biopolitics in the global health arena. The pandemic invalidated long-standing discourses of global collaboration and solidarity as it generated a swift return to national and exclusionary policies, challenged the self-evidence of government protection, pandemic preparedness, and public health institutions. To develop new frameworks for understanding these dynamics, we invited collaborators who use innovative methods and concepts to reflect on meanings of the social and the ethical in post-pandemic landscapes and explore (re-)emergent forms of governance and care.

Aside from offering an opportunity for our collaborators to meet in person for the first time, our meeting at the University of Salerno, located in the scenic Campania region of Italy, was a chance to crystallize the concepts and concerns that will bind us together in a broader dialogue over the coming year.

We can synthesize four key themes and questions emerging from the three days of presentations and discussions in Salerno:

1.        Pandemic Rationalities and Reconfigurations of the Social

Several workshop participants explored the role of government and care institutions in shaping and regulating social life, focusing on how institutions both enable and constrain individual and community experiences.

Yasmeen Arif explored what social facts or institutions constituted the social in reflections of the pandemic, or, how might the notion of the social be traced as instituted across the threshold of the pandemic. Understanding life as an institution, in response to Esposito’s query about instituting life, she  presented a possible lexicon naming potential institutions, which like all institutions, might work to affirm or to negate life and the social. This included health, identity, informality and as institutions of life /social facts, they are emergent across the threshold of the pandemic, institutions that move from the past to the future, carrying elements from the past and moving them into newer forms. Her talk was a reminder of what institutions do: to allow social cohesion and in that, allow a perspective on what the social is.

Alex Nading spoke about the paradox of personal protective equipment (PPE), examining its dual role in both protecting from and normalizing extreme conditions. Alex’ talk built on his ethnography research of sugarcane plantations in Nicaragua that have become ‘hotspots’ of chronic kidney disease among laborers due to work-related heat stress. In this context, as during the Covid19 pandemic, PPE can be understood as a biopolitical, rationalized technology, forming a protective barrier that simultaneously stretches the limits of what laboring bodies are supposed to withstand.

Federico Scarpelli presented a paper, written together with his colleague Fabio Dei, focused on the reactions of some Italian and European intellectuals to the pandemic, in particular the positions of Bruno Latour. Federico examined Latour’s insistent recourse to an 'eschatological' expectation about the pandemic - the idea, later disproved by events, that 'nothing could ever be the same again' – which, Federico argued, revealed a difficulty in proposing a concrete alternative to the status quo.

Carmelo Colangelo’s presentation drew inspiration from Ernesto de Martino's reflection on so-called ‘cultural apocalypses’ and Didier Fassin's reflection on the ‘politics of life’.  Carmelo showed how the notions of ‘crisis of presence’, ‘ethos of transcendence’ and ‘forms of life’ are crucial to understanding the outcomes of the global crisis and point to specific normative measures and socio-economic practices: of attitudes and choices in which the ‘end of the world’ can turn into the ‘end of a world’.

Marco Piasentier’s presentation examined the biopolitics of vaccination hesitancy, arguing that the current the literature on this issue tends to overlook its political dimensions. In his talk, Marco challenged the reductionist notion that vaccine skepticism can be attributed to cognitive errors, instead highlighting the socio-political context in which this phenomenon unfolds.

2.        Biopolitics and Governmentality

Other contributions explored the rationalities, technologies, and power dynamics underlying biopolitical governance in the context of public health crises.

Davide Tarizzo reflected on the evolving concept of biopolitics, influenced by management science. Davide posited that the notions of preparedness and problem-solving inherent to management science shift biopolitical governmentality towards a quasi-military character against perceived threats from nature.

Carlo Caduff presented on the stigma ascribed to hospital staff in India during the pandemic, showing how public health messaging and community behaviors reproduced the state’s agenda. He questioned the status of global health in India, where local dynamics often conflict with global institutions like the WHO.

Massimo Villani’s paper proposed that from the 1990s onwards, uncertainty, indeterminacy, and unpredictability were no longer perceived as factors threatening, but rather extending knowledge production. He argued that any attempt to calculate risk in order to manage social and material realities is consequently relinquished. The subjectivities that emerge within this dynamic must be prepared to absorb the shock of unpredictable events – giving body to a notion of resilience, which Massimo tried to replace, in his presentation, with that of resistance.

Finally, Thomas Cousins’ talk zoomed in on the way the pandemic blurred the boundaries between acute and chronic illness, using the novel diagnoses “post-tuberculosis” and “long-COVID” as cases. Thomas reflected on the meaning of the "post" in these contexts, and explored how the chronic consequences of infectious diseases are reshaping biopolitical health governance. His contribution considered the vitalist critique of life as evading normalization and the contrast this forms with emerging biopolitical regimes.

3.        The Social and the Natural

Another theme participants explored in their presentations was the relationship between the social and the natural, examining how related concepts like "nature" and "the environment" are mobilized in various ways in (post-)pandemic biopolitics.

Frédéric Keck’s presentation reflected on these concepts through the case of the work of virus hunters - virologists who collect samples from non-human animals to anticipate spillover events causing pandemics among humans. His talk asked what kind of biopolitics emerge from such a surveillance (and sometimes killing of suspicious) animals for pandemic preparedness.

Sanil V questioned the distinction between mechanism and organism made by modern Western philosophy, and wondered, instead, how we might think about life from a cosmological perspective. His talk examined these issues with reference to contemporary bio-environmental art, which explores the relationship between biological life and technology from a cosmological perspective.

4.        The Human and the Technological

The last theme contributors investigated were (re-)emerging human and technological entanglements, propelled and intensified by experiences of isolation and existential anxiety during the pandemic.

Annelin Eriksen used her ethnography of Bina48, a humanoid robot, to reflect on the concept of “memory” as the key ethnographic entry point for an analysis of body, mind and the human in contemporary technoscientific cultures, such as the US.

Martin Eggen Mogseth likewise explored question of technological identities through his study of the questions arising when donor conceived persons learns that they are donor conceived. Martin investigated the connection between personal narrative, genetics, and the technodigital complex through which information about the body qua self is mediated.

Fartein Hauan Nilsen, in his talk about digital companionship during Covid-19, remained with these questions of human-technological entanglements through an ethnography of chatbots as tools for emotional support during the pandemic. His paper critically examined the way in which surveillance capitalism is inherent in interactions with such chatbots, where people’s innermost thoughts and feelings are rendered into data to become commodities for corporate entities.

Lastly, Aldo Trucchio’s paper critiqued the idea that pandemic behaviors were driven by a universal fear of death, proposing instead that primary anxieties related to Covid-19 were centered on isolation and the medicalization of life - key aspects of modern biopolitical power. Aldo argued that the enjoyment many people find in depictions of catastrophe - whether artistic or realistic - can be seen as an imaginative reversal of biopolitical control, reflecting a desire for radical change, even if it brings destruction.

QUESTIONS FOR THE COMING YEAR

The presentations in Salerno highlighted the potential for anthropology, sociology, and engaged philosophy to critically examine and open new ways of thinking about the social and biopolitical implications of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Building on the contributions we gathered during this first workshop, we take the following questions on board for our upcoming workshops in Delhi (December 2024) and Ithaca, New York (May 2025): 

1. How do institutions shape and constrain social life, and what are the implications for individual and community experiences?
   

2. How, if at all, has the pandemic reconfigured the domain of the social and the boundaries of population groups; in other words, transformed the object of biopolitics? What registers of data and information, in the form of bodies, communities, histories and geographies, can now generate knowledge?
   

3. What are the underlying rationalities, technologies, and power dynamics that drive different forms of biopolitical governance, and how can these be critically examined?
   

4. What novel or renewed dimensions of living and dying, and affiliated forms of social and governance infrastructures, have emerged during and after the pandemic?
   

5. What is the role of anthropology in critically examining taken-for-granted assumptions and opening up new ways of thinking about social, political, and health-related phenomena?

   
   

Thank you to all the participants for this wonderful start to what promises to be an exciting and enduring collaboration on “The Biopolitics of Global Health after COVID-19”

Davide Tarizzo, Yasmeen Arif, Timothy Campbell, Thomas Cousins, Alex Nading, Carlo Caduff, Sanil V., Annelin Eriksen, Frédéric Keck, Federico Scarpelli, Carmelo Colangelo, Massimo Villani, Marco Piasentier, Martin Eggen Mogseth, Aldo Trucchio, Fartein Hauan Nilsen