Bio or necropolitics? the sovereign and Raison d’etat in the time of corona
I am not writing, nor am interested in writing, a story about the Corona virus. In this particular moment of global unknowing, many other such voices are at work to manage, mitigate, or understand the rather opaque trajectory on which we find ourselves. It does represent, however, an interesting moment and vantage point from which to pose certain grander questions. Namely, questions that have been at the forefront of post-strucuralism and the social sciences at large in the late 20th century, namely, sovereign power in late capitalism, the practice and logic of raison d’etat, and, of chief interest to me, the logic of the market in a time of crisis.
The more difficult role is to situate this moment in a larger history, in such a way that while we do not make the tired claim that “history has repeated itself”, processes which have been developing over the long duree become tangible and our present becomes , to a degree, less exceptional. One such moment I believe is alluded to in Foucaults “Madness and Civilization”, when in the 1650s, institutions of confinement, Hopitals in france and Zuchthausern in Germany for example, multiply rapidly across Europe. This is not in any way evidence of a sort of secular humanism that would supposedly come to define Enlightenment Europe. Rather, these institutions were borne in the immediate aftermath of a global financial crisis, and the logic of their creation was not the humane treatment of the mentally ill, but the containment and utilization of the unemployed or the destitute. In such a moment, the sovereign, the state in a rather general sense, becomes concerned not necessarily in the practice of negative power, but the management, cataloging, and productive elements of biological life. It is also a moment, where the logic of raison d’etat, not politics per se, becomes enmeshed with the logic of production.
Conservatism and Necrocapital
Does Foucaults Biopolitics however, go far enough in explaining power under the conditions of late capitalist logic? It is both an interesting and troubling moment.While conservatism, (which i refer to broadly as both a movement and meta-strategy), as it has always done in a state of exception, bemoans and warns, oddly enough, the loss of civil liberty and the dangers of the expansion of state power that this moment represents.( I say oddly here, because, as the USA jails more of its citizens per capita than any other nation on earth, has commodified incarceration into a multibillion dollar business, and has the largest and most destructive military apparatus on the planet, it seems rather a bit late to worry about the expansion of state power). It is therefore either, fabulously late to the party to speak metaphorically, or, more likely, engaged in a duplicitous and frightening game of propaganda and political maneuvering. Frightening, because conservatism and the state are no longer seemingly interested in the practice of biopolitics. They are not interested in containing, quarantining, healing, vaccinating, or expanding. It does not want to test the sick or watch their movements, and has done what little it has done only under immense pressure. It does however, want said population to return to the business of production, and it wants them back fast. Curious then, for if containment and cataloging has ceased to be the task of the sovereign, what is it then? If the task of sovereign power is no longer necessarily productive, then perhaps it is subordinated to the logic of the market, to the logic of accumulation? This particular logic of necrocaptialism has ceased, in large measure, its concern for the unique, biological characteristic of humanity, except in those ways that it remains essential to the practice of accumulation. In this sense the Necro refers not only to the sovereign taking of life, but in creating or allowing the conditions for death to take place.
From poltico to ragion di stato and back
It is sad, not in a condescending sense, but truly dolorous, to see the naivety of those, so subsumed by the logic of the market, that itis nearly impossible to divorce it from the political. Such was, in some ways, the task of Gucciardini, the Florentine civic philosopher, who in his Dialogo del reggimento di Firenze, sought to differentiate what he saw as the task of politico, the act of ruling the city with justice, with the art of the state, the Machiavellian logic of maintaining power at any cost. It is a tragic irony, that politics has become synoymous with the very thing by which it once defined itself against. No one can deny, except through pure ignorance or deceit, that the pursuit of power has become the defining task of the modern sovereign, and the application of said power dictated in large part by the logic of capital. Justice is little more than a propaganda word or window dressing, and much like the Demos of liberal democracy, something that has rarely been taken seriously. While it would be foolish to express too much optimism towards the future, and shallow defenders of the liberal order like Steven Pinker find themselves looking ever more foolish and obsolescent, there is perhaps room for some hope. As the anthropologist David Graeber has argued, democracy, true democracy, emerges in the spaces in between. Capitalism has shown itself a surprisingly mutable force, and also one posessed of devastating weakness. If theorists like Wallerstein are right, and that the expansionist ability of the capitalist world system is reaching its end, then perhaps it can again be possible to imagine a world outside the confines of the liberal state, and the logic of accumulation and production. It may be the time of monsters, but they need not necessarily be stronger than the better angels of our nature.