Governmentality, Science and the Media. Examining the “Pandemic Reality” with Foucault, Lyotard and Baudrillard
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.22439/fs.i35.7073Schlagworte:
Governmentality, Pandemic, Legitimation, Biopower, Scientific DebateAbstract
This article examines the legitimization process of the public health preventive measures implemented in many Western countries following the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak. Through concepts such as governmentality, disciplinarization and security mechanisms proposed by Foucault, we trace some of the basic principles and implications of the relationship between biopower and medicine, as well as the media dissemination of an official narrative on scientific truth. These reflections are complemented by the contributions of Francois Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard. Lyotard reflects on the relationship between science and a “performative game”, whose own staging is the core of its criteria of truth. Baudrillard shows the relevance of a “hyperreality” in which the signs presented by the media take precedence over the experience of the subjects. We argue that a mediatized version of science, defined through a strong disciplinarization of knowledge and the censorship of dissident voices, played a key role in the establishment of consensus and the legitimization of policies that granted extraordinary power to governments and transnational elites. Although the work of Foucault in this demonstration is essential, the contributions of Lyotard and Baudrillard provide additional elements to understand a fundamental problem: the public acceptance of “truth” as an instrument of governmentality on a global scale.Literaturhinweise
Alexander, Paul, Robin Armstrong, George Fareed, John Lotus, Ramin Oskoui, Chad Pro-dromos, Harvey A. Risch, Howard C. Tenenbaum, et al., “Early multidrug treatment of SARS-CoV-2 infection (COVID-19) and reduced mortality among nursing home (or outpatient/ambulatory) residents,” Medical Hypotheses 153 (2021), 110622. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mehy.2021.110622.
Angell, Marcia, “The pharmaceutical industry. To whom is it accountable?,” The New Eng-land Journal of Medicine 342:25 (2000), 1902-1904.
Applebaum, Anne, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism. New York: Penguin Random House, 2020.
Armstrong, David, “The COVID-19 pandemic and cause of death,” Sociology of Health & Illness 43:7 (2021), 1614-1626. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9566.13347.
Baudrillard, Jean, Screened Out [2000], trans. Chris Turner. London & New York: Verso, 2002.
Baudrillard, Jean, Simulacra and Simulation [1981], trans. Sheila Glaser. Michigan: Universi-ty of Michigan Press, 1995.
Baudrillard, Jean, The transparency of evil: essays on extreme phenomena [1990], trans. James Benedict. New York & London: Verso, 1993.
Beck, Ulrich, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity [1986], trans. Mark Ritter. London: Sage, 1992.
Blaylock, Russell, “COVID Update: What is the truth?,” Surgical Neurology International 13:167 (2022), 1-14. https://doi.org/10.25259/SNI_150_2022.
Cáceres, Carlos, “Unresolved COVID controversies: “Normal science” and potential non-scientific influences,” Global Public Health 17:4 (2022), 622-640. https://doi.org/10.1080/17441692.2022.2036219.
Constantinou, Costas, “Responses to Covid-19 as a form of ‘biopower’,” International Re-view of Sociology 32:1 (2022), 29-39. https://doi.org/10.1080/03906701.2021.2000069.
Elisha, Ety, Josh Guetzkow, Yaffa Shir-Raz, and Natti Ronel, “Retraction of scientific pa-pers: the case of vaccine research,” Critical Public Health 32:4 (2021), 533-542.
Ferguson, Neil, Daniel Laydon, Gemma Nedjati-Gilani, Natsuko Imai, Kylie Ainslie, Marc Baguelin, Sangeeta Bhatia, Adhiratha Boonyasiri, et al., “Impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to reduce COVID-19 mortality and healthcare demand,” Imperial College Response Team. Report 9 (16-03-2020). https://doi.org/10.25561/77482.
Floridi, Luciano, The Fourth Revolution: How the Infosphere is Reshaping Human Reality. Ox-ford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality. 1. The Will to Knowledge [1976], trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978.
Foucault, Michel, An Archaeology of Knowledge [1969], trans. Allan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon Books, 1982.
Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison [1975], trans. Allan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.
Foucault, Michel, The Birth of the Clinic. An Archaeology of Medical Perception [1963], trans. Allan Sheridan. Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003.
Foucault, Michel, Society Must Be Defended. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-76, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey. New York: Picador, 2003.
Foucault, Michel, The Birth of Biopolitics. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-79, ed. Mi-chael Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
Foucault, Michel, Security, Territory, Population. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-78, ed. Michael Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009.
Foucault, Michel, Qu'est-ce que la critique? Suivi de La Culture de Soi. Paris : Librairie Philo-sophique J. VRIN, 2015.
Gadea, Carlos A. and Rafael Bayce, “Coronavirus: una pandemia hiperreal,” Estudios So-ciológicos 39:115 (2021), 209-236. https://doi.org/10.24201/es.2021v39n115.2074.
Gillborn, David, Paul Warmington and Sean Demack, “QuantCrit: education, policy, ‘Big Data’ and principles for a critical race theory of statistics,” Race Ethnicity and Education 21:2 (2018), 158-179. https://doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2017.1377417.
Gjerde, Lars, “Governing humans and ‘things’: power and rule in Norway during the Covid-19 pandemic,” Journal of Political Power 14: 3 (2021), 472-492. https://doi.org/10.1080/2158379X.2020.1870264.
Harrington, John, “Indicators, Security and Sovereignty during COVID-19 in the Global South.” International Journal of Law in Context 17:2 (2021), 249-60.
Hecketsweiler, Chloé and Cédric Pietralunga, “Coronavirus : les simulations alarmantes des épidémiologistes pour la France,” Le Monde (March 15, 2020). https://www.lemonde.fr/planete/article/2020/03/15/coronavirus-les-simulations-alarmantes-des-epidemiologistes-pour-la-france_6033149_3244.html.
Horton, Richard, “Offline: What is medicine’s 5 sigma?,” The Lancet 385 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(15)60696-1.
Ioannidis, John, Sally Cripps, and Martin Tanner, “Forecasting for COVID-19 has failed,” International Journal of Forecasting 38:2 (2022), 423-438. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijforecast.2020.08.004.
Ioannidis, John, “Reconciling estimates of global spread and infection fatality rates of COVID- 19: An overview of systematic evaluations,” European Journal of Clinical Investi-gation 51:5 (2021), 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1111/eci.13554.
Ioannidis, John, Catherine Axfors, Despina Contopoulos-Ioannidis. “Population-level COVID-19 mortality risk for non-elderly individuals overall and for non-elderly individ-uals without underlying diseases in pandemic epicenters,” Environmental Research 188 (2020), 1-10. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envres.2020.109890.
Jureidini, Jon, and Leemon B. McHenry, “The illusion of evidence based medicine,” British Medical Journal 376 (2022), o7022022. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.o702.
Latour, Bruno and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life. The Construction of Scientific Facts. Prince-ton: Princeton University Press, 1986.
Latour, Bruno, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence. Cambridge (Mass): Harvard University Press, 2013.
Latour, Bruno, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.
Leake, John, and Peter McCullough, The Courage to Face COVID-19: Preventing Hospitaliza-tion and Death While Battling the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex. Counterplay Books, 2022.
Liester, Mitchell, “The suppression of dissent during the COVID-19 pandemic,” Social Epis-temology Review and Reply Collective 11: 4 (2022), 53-76.
Lorenzini, Daniele, “Biopolitics in the Time of Coronavirus,” Critical Inquiry 47:S2 (2021): S40-S45. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/711432#xref_fn4.
Lyotard, Jean-Francois, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minnesota: Vin-tage Books, 1984.
McGoey, Linsey, No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philan-thropy. Verso Publication, 2015.
Mucchielli, Laurent, La Doxa du Covid. Tome I. Eoliénne, 2022.
Peet, Richard, The Unholy Trinity. The IMF, World Bank and WTO. London: Zed Books, 2009.
Perronne, Christian, Les 33 questions auxquelles ils n’ont toujours pas répondu. Paris: Albin Michel, 2022.
Rabinow, Paul, and Nikolas Rose, “Biopower Today,” BioSocieties 1 (2006), 195-217. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1745855206040014.
Reiss, Karina, and Sucharit Bhakdi, Corona, False Alarm?: Facts and Figures. Chelsea Green Publishing, 2020.
Rose, Nikolas, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 1999.
Rose, Nikolas, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007.
Rothman, Barbara, The Biomedical Empire: Lessons Learned from the COVID-19 Pandemic. Stanford University Press, 2021.
Shir-Raz, Yaffa, Ety Elisha, Brian Martin, Natti Ronel, Josh Guetzkow, “Censorship and Suppression of Covid.19 Heterodoxy: Tactics and Counter-Tactics,” Minerva (2022). Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-022-09479-4.
Sirimarco, Mariana, “Entre el cuidado y la violencia. Fuerzas de seguridad argentinas en pandemia y aislamiento,” Revista de Estudios Sociales 78 (2021), 93-109. https://doi.org/10.7440/res78.2021.06.
Van der Veer Martens, Betsy, “An illustrated introduction to the Infosphere”, Library Trends 63:3 (2015), 317-361.
Downloads
Veröffentlicht
Zitationsvorschlag
Ausgabe
Rubrik
Lizenz
Dieses Werk steht unter der Lizenz Creative Commons Namensnennung - Nicht-kommerziell - Keine Bearbeitungen 4.0 International.
Authors retain copyright to their work, but assign the right of the first publication to Foucault Studies. The work is subject to a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license, but despite these restrictions, authors can take for granted that Foucault Studies will permit articles published in Foucault Studies to be translated or reprinted in another format such as a book providing a full reference is made to Foucault Studies as the original place of publication.
