Foucault, COVID19 and the New Normal

One of the overarching themes of Security, Territory, Population is the intimate relationship between power and ethics. The text highlights Foucault’s hypothesis that power is in everything, and everything is subjected to a power – be it the population of a town, the students in a classroom, or inmates in a prison. Admittedly, the notion of power as an all-encompassing principle is not exclusive to Foucault. Many prominent thinkers that came before him too had ambitious ideas for the workings of power. For example, Karl Marx earned a name for himself by proposing that power was dynamically linked to the social and economic circumstances of a society; with the potential to culminate into violent class antagonisms (Marx & Engels, 1848). Another very interesting example would be the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, whose ideas on the nature of power have left an indelible mark on modern poststructuralist thought – one which has influenced Foucault and Foucauldian thought to an incredibly large extent. In Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil (1886), he famously mentions that the will-to-power is the “fundamental fact of all history” – barring its grandiosity, this is a fact that I believe cannot be viewed through simple philosophical empiricisms (Nietzsche, 1886, p. 259). This goes the same for Foucault’s power.

To this end, Nietzsche’s idea of a will-to-power has obviously influenced Foucault’s maxim on power in Society Must Be Defended (1976) as something capable of “making live and letting die”, a phrase which sums up his formulations on biopower, or the techniques to achieve absolute subjugation of bodies and control over populations (p. 241). Foucault’s conception of biopower is combined with the idea of disciplinary power, or the power over individuals, as evident in Security, Territory, Population. As such, examples of this control and subjugation can be seen in how disciplinary power is projected within prisons whereby, after undergoing disciplinary detention, prisoners are encouraged to avoid recidivism. Discipline establishes a “normative norm”, that is normal in the sense that killing another human is abnormal. These are some of the examples that Foucault posits to highlight how power exists everywhere, from the disciplinary powers at work in prison cells to normalizing powers at work in society as a whole. In this essay, I will be critical of his notion of power while also identifying the realms in which his ideas are still effective in our current existential milieu.

As convincing of an idea this is especially to the layman, the notion of a “theory of everything” using power is simply not realistic as power in this sense is not tangible; it is impossible to prove whether it exists everywhere or not. However the fact of the matter is that there has always been power differentials between people and as such, power cannot be the de facto determinant for human behaviour, or explain why humans are subjected to a certain behaviour because of an interstitial “power” that has executive control over our social and mental faculties. In Subject and Power (1982), Foucault states that power is “exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free” (p. 790). However, this notion of power creates a categorical error in that, according to Jurgen Habermas, it offers an “ontological condition where a normative foundation is needed” (King, 2009, p. 300). Even if people are only free when subjected to a power, it is by no means an exigent for people to exercise that freedom in the first place.

For Foucault, to achieve freedom is to: 1) be subjected by means of not stepping outside of power relations, and 2) be subjects of a regime of truth that legitimizes government (Viriasova, n.d, p. 76). This is the Foucauldian vision of freedom. However, the power-freedom nexus as it were is almost always circumstance dependent; it is not that, for example, the panopticon forces prisoners to behave in a certain way, but that it compels them to consciously change their behaviour in relation to their circumstance. Whether the prisoners choose to go with the flow or resist is a separate matter from whether they should, which is entirely circumstantial. As such, why should a prisoner seek the same kind of freedom that Foucault seeks when both parties are under completely different circumstances; the types of freedom that the prisoners seek, whatever they could be, would obviously be vis-à-vis to the castigating institutions they are subjected to. Given its non-arbitrary nature, it is not right to say power equals freedom, or that power poses a constraint on freedom, and freedom of thought in particular. Although power can act as an external constraint, it is by no means the only constraint; there are also internal constraints such as an individual’s intellectual and moral psychologies that could influence action (Owen & Campbell, 2014, p. 138). This is something that Foucault rarely emphasize.

Moving on, the idea of a government disposif – a governmentality, and more specifically its application in postcolonial perspectives have been quite historically contingent. In Discipline and Punish (1975), Foucault writes about how at the turn of the eighteenth century, the methods of punishment shifted from physical torture to more punitive practices aimed at creating docility through disciplinary power (p. 8). During this time, the idea of torture as a public spectacle eventually became connotated with savagery and incivility; contemporary Europeans wanted no part of this. As such, the paradigms of punishment gradually became more hidden from the public with the advent of new techniques of punishment such as an economy of penalties aimed at an individual’s rights. According to Fernandez and Esteves (2017), Foucault’s notion of disciplinary power rings true in the behaviours of colonial powers whom, while “relaxed oppression at home” also “exerted direct and non-mediated violence upon the bodies of colonial subjects” comparative to those in Medieval times (p. 143). This looks very contradictory, but the hypocrisy is legitimized by the metropolitan powers declaring colonial subjects as “Others” that are inferior and incapable of representing good values and ethics (p. 144). Thus, the caveat is that the oppression of the colonized people is hidden from the everyday European experience – an act justified by racial supremacy. This exposes the backwardness of European colonialism and proves Foucault’s point on how the assemblage of forms of practical knowledge has compelled the Europeans to express power in a certain way to achieve a certain end based on the perceived conduct of the governed. The nexus between power-governmentality-colonialism appears very relevant here.  Resultingly, this set of practices (i.e. physical oppression) have had a lasting influence on the post-colonialist experience. Just like in Malaysia, society from previously colonized nations seem to perceive Westerners as more civilized, educated and dare I say, even superior. I think this is no surprise because of the various circumstances and realities that were created by our old Colonialist masters; the Chinese were tin miners, the Indians were taxi drivers, and the Malays were bare natives – but the Europeans? They were the administrators and we were the subjects to their crown. This is the “genealogy” that Foucault speaks of in Discipline and Punish whereby the formation of a thought is actually a direct result of discursive social-historical-psychological processes (p. 29). To this end, by using a genealogy method we can extract the reasons as to why post-colonialist societies are so complementary to the West, and that is because of the “social reality” they have imparted in us indirectly through dispositifs.

In defence of Foucault’s conception of biopolitics, just have a look at the COVID-19 pandemic in Malaysia. By adapting biopolitics with the more relevant concept (for today) of populism, the state has effectively controlled movements of people by de-emphasizing pluralism and advocating a monopoly of moralistic truths. These are supposedly objective truths created by the government backed by statistical technologies such as epidemiological and biometric data aimed at conveying: “We are not done with COVID-19 yet”. This is very interesting because the way biopolitics enforces behaviour during pandemics is through advocation of doing the morally right thing; to engage in draconian measures of wearing masks and social distancing to protect others and oneself. This creates a normative norm because in actuality it is not the state that engages in biopolitics, it is the people themselves; behaviours of a group normalize the behaviours of another group. Take for instance the urge to ask someone to wear a mask when they are coughing. This is also evident in how people are using social media to actually denounce and shame people that are going outside, not wearing masks, not social distancing, etcetera. Clearly, phenomena like this have implications for democracy as we have no choice but to submit our moral judgments to fear of contracting the disease, even though the disease may in fact not be as deadly as one perceives it to be. This alludes to what Giorgio Agamben calls the State of Exception whereby the government acquires incredible powers over citizens and their civic freedoms in the name of “safety” (2005, p. 1). This similarity gives Foucault’s biopolitics more credence. Although the same arguments apply to biopolitics the same way it applies to Foucauldian power relations as a whole, it is undoubtedly less grandiose when looking at the perspective of our current milieu and the specific circumstances it has imposed on us.

After looking at several of Foucault’s texts, and especially Security, Territory, Population, it struck me that Foucault views power relations the same way a physicist would view physics; it is his raison d'être. Although I disagree with the notion of subjectivity and its entanglements with power as a theory for everything, it is perhaps also unfair to say it is anything but. I believe this is what kept Foucault’s ideas timeless. The Foucauldian analysis of colonialism/post-colonialism to the idea of biopolitics and to how it has affected social and political change has certainly stood the test of time but only when adapted to contemporary scenarios like the COVID-19 pandemic. In large, his ideas are still very prominent in some domains of  21^st century thought however it would be even greater to see his ideas, and others, held against a purely biological standard – to see how neurons or neurochemicals may affect human politicizing, to see how biological evolution has shaped our preference for certain ideologies, and to see how much free will itself (or lack thereof) could be attributed to biological mechanisms. This I believe is the final frontier of human thought. 

The Question for this assignment was as follows;

"Critically evaluate Michel Foucault’s selected texts on power, security and governmentality in the light of our current existential milieu, our lives unfolding within the present horizon of an on-going global Covid-19 pandemic."