DISCIPLINARY BIOPOLITICS VS THE NEW POPULISM

PART 1: MONSIEUR FOUCAULT GETS COVID

Don’t be silly. Michel Foucault died in 1984, so he obviously was never infected with Sars-CoV-2. Though, he did die from the illness providing the world’s last major public health crisis – with some interesting connections to this most recent one.¹ What Foucault clearly did get, though, was what has been happening over the last couple years, plus, with COVID and the massive power grab on the part of the administrative state, fueled by the managerial class’s insatiable appetite for social engineering.

In fact, in recent posts, I’ve highlighted the value in the work of both Michel Foucault (see, here) and Paul Piccone (see, here and here) in helping us understand today’s world. Despite both having been deceased long ago, the prescience of their theoretical insights continues to provide valuable windows of understanding for the contemporary world. As I’ll show here, that contemporary relevance is strikingly evident in helping dissect so many of the disturbing and peculiar features of the recent (current?) COVID regime.

Emphasizing this relevance, I think, is especially important as neither of them usually musters much attention in the managerial-dissident and populist-sympathetic circles to which this substack aspires to contribute, and who (as we’ll see) were the target of the politicized measures of the COVID regime. The former claim, there, I think is self-evident; the latter will be demonstrated as we go. Foucault’s analysis prompts us to ask some pointed questions about the nature of COVID physical strictures; Piccone helps us answer those questions. This post, part 1, examines Foucault’s work on the nature of disciplinary biopolitics. In the next post, part 2 of the article, all this will be meaningfully contextualized by examining Piccone’s analysis of the new populism.

I’m hardly the only person to have drawn attention to the prescience of Foucault’s warning about the danger of the new biopolitics, or that it would be driven by a medicalization of the administrative state. Though I did do that (again, here). This though seems to be as far as most Foucauldian-inspired commentators have gone with it. I want in this post though to point out that Foucault’s insight into what we’ve been facing goes even deeper than that. And this additional wrinkle I’m seeing discussed less often.²

Another important dimension of the COVID situation of course has been the aspiringly totalitarian expanse of information control. This went from tainting alternative analyses, with social media attached warnings, and hit pieces besmirching the reputation of the critics, to outright censorship, de-platforming, and professional purges. All this information control though was premised on the capacity of the COVID regime to be continually monitoring all discussion, references, or in some cases even just vague inferences, as related to criticisms, as well as alternative analyses and suppressed data. This phenomenal capacity for massive surveillance of discourse was anticipated by Foucault in arguably his most influential book, translated into English as Discipline and Punish.³

Through that 1975 book he introduced panopticism: sometimes characterized as the idea of the total surveillance society. While he may have been on the early end of predicting such a world, that is nowhere near a unique insight on Foucault’s part. However, his claim was more ambitious than that. His idea was that since people knew they could be being watched by the authorities at any time, the tendency would be for them to always act as though they were being watched: better to constantly present the behavior of a docile, obedient subject than to risk the random chance of being caught behaving otherwise.

We can hardly say that Foucault’s panopticism was universally experienced. There were plenty of COVID dissidents. And while we wouldn’t want to understate the costs many of them incurred, personally and professionally, they obviously weren’t cowed by the threat of panoptic power. Yet, while I’ve no data to support the proposition, do you doubt that there were plenty of people – maybe plenty of people you know personally? – who conscientiously self-edited their social media posts, maybe even their public statements within uncertain social or professional gatherings, precisely with an eye to avoid being denounced as anti-vaxxer, conspiracy theorist, grandma killer, anti-science, and all the rest?

So, I suspect that a great deal of what happened, and precisely was allowed to happen, during 2020-2021 (and who knows if it’s over yet), is well explained by a theoretical analysis from Foucault nearly half a century ago. But, in fact, I think that that same book may provide an even more penetrating insight into the COVID experience than even panopticism does. This deeper insight grows out of the analysis that had gradually led Foucault to the idea of panopticism: the disciplinary regulation of bodies.⁴ Before unpacking that, though, let’s tee up the problem which I’m claiming his analysis helps us better understand, all these decades later.

Here, I’m thinking of the combination of severe physical strictures imposed by the COVID regime despite, from very early on, the increasingly evident, odd irrationality of those policies. The most obvious of these were lockdowns, social distancing, and masking. So, look, as the kids say on YouTube these days, no medical advice; I’m not a doctor (by which they mean physician); etc. and so on. But from pretty early on there seemed to be good reason to believe that these physical constraints, regulating our behavior, had little benefit, and with time it has become clear that in some cases these policies even resulted in counterproductive public health effects.⁵

So, then, why were these physical constraints so relentlessly enforced, for so long, with so much vitriol, coercion and fanaticism? Some have pointed to simple bureaucratic failure, others to moral panic and “mass formation”; some see merely a calculated effort to use precautionary overkill to ensure sufficient social commitment to public health objectives, while others interpret them as little more than a demand to manifest submission. And, sure, any of that may have played a role. But, considering how much else he got right about all this, what other interpretation might be offered through Foucault’s analysis?   

Leading into his more expansive analysis of panopticism, Foucault provides a meticulous dissection of the ways in which recent centuries have seen an increasing regulation of bodies, in the interest of molding specific kinds of subjects. This is the “discipline” referenced in the title of his book. It is the way in which a regime (using that term in its broadest sense, as the totality of social, political, and economic forces expressing the interests of the ruling class) molds humans into the subjects useful to its purposes. For a flavor of Foucault’s argument, consider some the book’s passages:

What was then being formed was a policy of coercions that act upon the body, a calculated manipulation of its elements, its gestures, its behaviour. The human body was entering a machinery of power that explores it, breaks it down and rearranges it. A ‘political anatomy’, which was also a ‘mechanics of power’, was being born; it defined how one may have a hold over others’ bodies, not only so that they may do what one wishes, but so that they may operate as one wishes, with the techniques, the speed and the efficiency that one determines. Thus discipline produces subjected and practised bodies, ‘docile’ bodies.

These forms of discipline, as machinery of power, perhaps unsurprisingly are most obviously observed in institutions distinctive for their widely recognized need for discipline, such as prisons and the military barracks. Consider this analysis of military marching training:

We have passed from a form of injunction that measured or punctuated gestures to a web that constrains them or sustains them throughout their entire succession. A sort of anatomo-chronological schema of behaviour is defined. The act is broken down into its elements; the position of the body, limbs, articulations is defined; to each movement are assigned a direction, an aptitude, a duration; their order of succession is prescribed. Time penetrates the body and with it all the meticulous controls of power.

Less immediately obvious, though, is when the same kinds of discipline, machinery of power, begins to appear in institutions less apparently in need of such draconian, meticulous regulating of bodies: e.g., hospitals, factories, and schools. Here for instance are some observations about educational institutions:

In every class there will be places assigned for all the pupils of all the lessons, so that all those attending the same lesson will always occupy the same place. Pupils attending the highest lessons will be placed in the benches closest to the wall, followed by the others according to the order of the lessons moving towards the middle of the classroom … Each of the pupils will have his place assigned to him and none of them will leave it or change it except on the order or with the consent of the school inspector.

Good handwriting, for example, presupposes a gymnastics – a whole routine whose rigorous code invests the body in its entirety, from the points of the feet to the tip of the index finger. The pupils must always ‘hold their bodies erect, somewhat turned and free on the left side, slightly inclined, so that, with the elbow placed on the table, the chin can be rested upon the hand, unless this were to interfere with the view; the left leg must be somewhat more forward under the table than the right. A distance of two fingers must be left between the body and the table; for not only does one write with more alertness, but nothing is more harmful to the health than to acquire the habit of pressing one’s stomach against the table; the part of the left arm from the elbow to the hand must be placed on the table. The right arm must be at a distance from the body of about three fingers and be about five fingers from the table, on which it must rest lightly.’

Quoting again one of his contemporary sources, Foucault concludes:

‘The teacher will place the pupils in the posture that they should maintain when writing, and will correct it either by sign or otherwise, when they change this position’ (La Salle, Conduite …, 63–4). A disciplined body is the prerequisite of an efficient gesture.

Across institutions, private and public, this general regulating of bodies, toward the molding of subjects – particularly docile subjects – is observed by Foucault. He reveals this discipline as a new way of understanding and embodying institutional (and what he’d call “discursive”) power. It is arguably the original insight into the very core of the concepts he’d later popularize, and that seem so revealing today, of biopolitics and biopower. The kernel of all that seems to me to be right here:

disciplinary controls of activity belonged to a whole series of researches, theoretical or practical, into the natural machinery of bodies; but they began to discover in them specific processes; behaviour and its organized requirements gradually replaced the simple physics of movement. The body, required to be docile in its minutest operations, opposes and shows the conditions of functioning proper to an organism.

If your initial reaction to these descriptions — e.g., of training for marching or handwriting — is that they’re excessive, bearing no resemblance to the COVID strictures, are you sure about that? Think of all the precise instructions about how to wear a mask properly, flight attendants waking passengers if their mask slipped below their nose; the adhesively affixed signs on the floors of stores, offices, even out on sidewalks, delineating and instructing the proper bodily spacing to insure six feet distance; the bubble rules about who could and couldn’t be in proximity to your body; the anal dictates about proper hand washing method and duration. Does Foucault’s emphasis here seem so over the top, when you really think about it?

So, again, if we start with the idea that Foucault has turned out to be impressively prescient in his anticipation of the kind of biopolitics, medicalized social engineering and authoritarianism, and pancopticism, so characteristic of the COVID regime, it may well be that our best way to understand the apparently irrational physical strictures so fanatically and aggressively imposed in the name of public health is indeed as a form of Foucauldian discipline. To be clear, this is not the same as denouncing the physical strictures as loyalty tests or demands for public submission. It is a claim that they serve to discipline the very use of one’s own body, toward molding us into a specific kind of subject, useful to those who manipulate these disciplinary machineries of power.

But then we have the question: what kind of subject are we being molded into? Foucault saw this process in the early centuries of modernity as molding people into modern individuals. It’s hardly original today to note that one of the deleterious impacts of classical liberalism, with its hyper-emphasis upon the individual, has been the neutering of the civil society institutions that have historically mediated between the subject/citizen and the state. As these mediating institutions – friendly and mutual aid societies, professional organizations, neighborhood associations, churches, clubs, etc., even the family – have been gradually eroded through the breakdown of communal bonds, with the shift of social emphasis upon the individual, that individual increasingly comes into an unmediated and dependent relationship with the state.

This insight is central to understanding the disciplinary biopolitics of the COVID regime. To fully unpack that assessment, though, and its contemporary political implications, we’ll need to turn to Paul Piccone’s analysis of the new populism. And that will be coming in the next post.

So, if you haven’t yet…

1. Robert F. Kennedy Jr, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health (New York, NY: Skyhorse, 2021).

2. It may be of course that I don’t travel sufficiently widely in the circles of Foucault scholarship. Though, even if there are some Foucault scholars who have gone as deeply on this as I will, I doubt any of them have emphasized the implications I’m unpacking in part 2 of this article.

3. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 2nd ed. edition (New York: Vintage, 1995).

4. The idea was extrapolated from the panopticon, a physical design for a prison offered by Jeremy Bentham, organized so that the body of the prisoner was always available to be on display through observation from within a central tower, which was itself designed so that no prisoner could ever see if a prison guard or official was actually in it and watching him.

5. AIER Staff, “Lockdowns Do Not Control the Coronavirus: The Evidence,” December 19, 2020, accessed July 28, 2022, https://www.aier.org/article/lockdowns-do-not-control-the-coronavirus-the-evidence/; John Gibson, “Government Mandated Lockdowns Do Not Reduce Covid-19 Deaths: Implications for Evaluating the Stringent New Zealand Response,” New Zealand Economic Papers 56, no. 1 (January 2, 2022): 17–28, https://doi.org/10.1080/00779954.2020.1844786; Brownstone Institute, “Lockdowns Fail: They Do Not Control the Virus,” Brownstone Institute, July 16, 2021, https://brownstone.org/articles/lockdowns-fail-they-do-not-control-the-virus/; Douglas W. Allen, “Covid-19 Lockdown Cost/Benefits: A Critical Assessment of the Literature,” International Journal of the Economics of Business 29, no. 1 (January 2, 2022): 1–32, https://doi.org/10.1080/13571516.2021.1976051; Christian Bjørnskov, “Did Lockdown Work? An Economist’s Cross-Country Comparison,” CESifo Economic Studies 67, no. 3 (September 25, 2021): 318–31, https://doi.org/10.1093/cesifo/ifab003; Thomas Meunier, “Full Lockdown Policies in Western Europe Countries Have No Evident Impacts on the COVID-19 Epidemic” (medRxiv, May 1, 2020), https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.24.20078717; Amir Shlomai et al., “Modeling Social Distancing Strategies to Prevent SARS-CoV-2 Spread in Israel: A Cost-Effectiveness Analysis,” Value in Health 24, no. 5 (May 1, 2021): 607–14, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jval.2020.09.013; Paul Alexander, “The Dangers of Masks | AIER,” American Institute for Economic Research, April 9, 2021, https://www.aier.org/article/the-dangers-of-masks/; C. Raina MacIntyre et al., “A Cluster Randomised Trial of Cloth Masks Compared with Medical Masks in Healthcare Workers,” BMJ Open 5, no. 4 (April 1, 2015): e006577, https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2014-006577; “Are Face Masks Effective? The Evidence.,” Swiss Policy Research, July 30, 2020, https://swprs.org/face-masks-evidence/; “Coronavirus Fact-Check #6: Does Wearing a Mask Do Anything?,” OffGuardian (blog), June 6, 2020, https://off-guardian.org/2020/06/06/coronavirus-fact-check-6-does-wearing-a-mask-do-anything/.