Will Covid World Ever End?
The new normal of Covid World control systems has deep roots in psychopolitics and capitalism that mean it will be hard to get rid of
Michel Foucault theorized that, since the 17th Century, power has transformed into a more subtle, modern form. Power no longer is expressed by the omnipotent sovereign’s ability to deal death—sovereign power is “the ability to seize hold of life in order to suppress it.” Power now does not seek to crush and repress life, but rather to manage and reproduce life. The “old power of death” was replaced by the new form of power and control—what he called “the administration of bodies” and the “calculated administration of life.”
This new phase was “disciplinary power,” as opposed to the sovereign power that obtained before the 17th Century. Because it was intended to administrate life rather than repress and crush it, Foucault called the modern regime biopower, the power to the reproduce life, rather than brutishly crushing it whenever the population got too uppity, as sovereign power did. This appeared with the emergence of liberalism in the 17th century, replacing monarchical modes of governance and politics. Politics became something that happened along with the population, rather than something that was done to crush it down.
This tendency of liberal biopower created its own politics—biopolitics. Recent commentators, like Byung-Chul Han, however, have argued that this regime of liberal biopolitics has given way in the neoliberal period since about the mid-1970s to what can now be described as psychopolitics. This is a much more individualized disciplinary regime. But unlike the sovereign era, in which force was wielded directly against individuals to repress them and maintain control and domination, now the individual himself acts as his own sovereign against himself. Psychopolitics is the return of the sovereign within the individual psyche.
The neoliberal subject is busy constantly optimizing himself, to be the perfect achievement subject, so he doesn’t need to be controlled or disciplined at all. He is a perfect smooth orb of market-ready employability. The friction between who he is and what the market wants is constantly sanded down within the neoliberal subject’s psyche— it a priori contains nothing that the market itself would disapprove of.
This is one reason why cancel culture has been promoted and embraced by so many. It normalizes conditions of the a priori deletion of any thoughts that could potentially be problematic. If you haven’t yet gotten to a place where problematic thoughts are unthinkable to you, then you are not yet the optimized neoliberal achievement subject.
If you present yourself to the neoliberal marketplace as anything other than an endlessly adaptable and flexible economic actor ready, willing, and able to be plugged into the market on the market’s own terms, you have already lost. And since the neoliberal marketplace represents what economists call a “race to the bottom,” the psychopolitics of neoliberal subjectivity consists of internalizing this race to the bottom (being a willing slave of capital, an enthusiastic gig worker, and grateful temp employee). This self-abasement must rather be conceived of by the neoliberal subject as self-empowerment. Neoliberal psychopolitics is self-exploitation with a good conscience. It is the synthesis of the crushing power of sovereignty with the seeming progressive positivity of liberal biopolitics, to produce results that are in the interests of power, without power even needing to force you to.
This is why positive psychology is so ubiquitous right now—the obvious negativity of neoliberal exploitation must never be acknowledged, it has been made necessarily invisible a priori as a precondition for playing the game at all. We can only have eyes now for what is positive and good, and since nothing actually is positive and good in totalizing neoliberal capitalist conditions, that means we have eyes for nothing at all. This, of course, is how power wants us to be, but power doesn’t even have to coerce us to be this way, because, as good neoliberal subjects, we have convinced ourselves that this is also how we want ourselves to be.
A good servant never has to be asked to do anything—rather, he anticipates what the master wants. The good servant of capital does this by emptying himself out of any subjective content, since that could get in the way of optimally serving capital. We have to clear ourselves out, so that our master, capital itself, can think for us, speak for us, and use us to reproduce itself. The predominant psychological disposition, as I mentioned earlier, is positivity, and gratitude. We are encouraged to be grateful for the opportunity to serve capital, and to always be positive. But this positivity is a fake positivity, a positivity born only of the fear to face the negativity staring at us, all around us, and so has no real content to it at all.
Real positivity posits something, it is full. This neoliberal psychopolitical positivity is nothing but giving an undeserved good conscience to the soulless conditions of capitalism’s current phase. It is the rationalization of negativity, masquerading as positivity, rather than any kind of positivity worthy of the name—one that posits something, which could then itself negate the hegemonic negativity of neoliberal capitalism.
This brings us to our current situation, of capitalism in the age of Covid-19. Capital was waiting and preparing for something just like this—a 9/11 that happens every day, all over America and the whole world, rather than just one morning in New York City. Just as 9/11 called for the sacrifice of our freedoms in exchange for “security” from terrorism, and of solidarity with U.S. forces invading and destroying Iraq, Covid calls for sacrifice and solidarity, but with the American economy and “way of life” (which are of course the same thing).
As good neoliberal subjects living under capitalism in the Covid era, we are expected to sacrifice our freedom to live so that capitalism can remain secure. Since the American way of life is little more than a series of economic transactions, we must make sacrifices and do our part to secure a healthy future for capital itself. We have a duty to the economy, but the economy has no duty to us—neither does the government, which is itself little more than an appendage of corporate power. We are merely servants of capital, getting in the way of its ongoing self-realization process. We can’t do anything other than make ourselves efficient, smooth vectors for capital’s optimal self-expression. Compared to capital, we don’t matter at all—it is supposed to be our pleasure and honor to restore capital to health.
The 9/11 of Covid is the threat of capital being weakened and destabilized, and if that happens, then the terrorists won. Being a good American after 9/11 meant blindly supporting the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the Patriot Act, Guantánamo Bay, and the Iraq War. It meant sacrificing real freedom for these fake security measures that made nothing safer, but rather destabilized the world order, and normalized an unprecedented surveillance state. It meant showing support and solidarity for our troops in a war of aggression that everyone knew was unjust. It also meant, as former President George W. Bush said, “going shopping.” Now that our freedoms have already been sacrificed already 20 years ago, being a good American literally just means going shopping—sacrificing your health (i.e. freedom) for the economy, and showing solidarity and support to essential workers who keep the basics of the economy up and running, so that we are able to do our duty of sacrificing ourselves for the economy.
Consumption is now a matter of patriotism and nationalistic duty, to get the economy humming again. This is a right-wing push to participate in the economy out of some weird blind patriotism, but we also see a similar tendency from a liberal direction. Identity has become the main framework through which everything is understood by liberals, from politics to culture and everything between. The liberal tendency of defining the self through self-commodification and capitalist consumption creates this push to participate in the economy as an expression of self. So we have a conservative push along social-patriotism lines, and a liberal push along self-actualization lines.
Covid capitalism is the synthesis of the two modern disciplinary regimes of liberal biopolitics and neoliberal psychopolitics. This is what the last few decades have been building towards. This dialectic has closed down upon us like a pincer, and now that it has clamped down, it is, in some form or other, here to stay. Covid control regimes have a biopolitical aspect, carefully administrating and managing bodily and social space—social distancing, having to wait in lines outside stores spaced 6 feet apart on the sidewalk on special stickers telling you where to stand, mandatory masks, lockdown, temperature checks before entering stores, having to do self-quarantine for 14 days after arriving from certain states, having to supply your contact tracing info to officers when crossing into certain states, and on and on.
The psychopolitical aspects of Covid capitalism as a control regime are how quickly we have forgotten how life used to be and how total virtual existence seems like the way things have always been; the cheer with which many of us have adopted Zoom as a way of life, from work to dating; self-imposed regimentation and enthusiastically embraced rule-following; scolding people for minor violations of this new etiquette and so on. This is the synthesis of decades of behavior self-modification in the interest of capitalist social production and reproduction.
Even if there were a vaccine, which there may eventually be, it will probably not be permanent, since recent studies have shown that antibodies do not last very long—people can get reinfected and so on. And it would either be prohibitively expensive, or most Americans would just refuse to even take it. But even if a permanent cure is found, made freely available, and everybody took it, Covid social controls wouldn’t be lifted, because it is just too valuable to capitalism—and on some level, we know this, and since we’ve been conditioned to only be able to think in terms of what is best for capital, we will resist the lifting of Covid social controls, or at least not question the fact that they will never fully go away.
The means by which total submission to the whims of capital can be achieved, simultaneous biopolitical and psychopolitical control, has been discovered and implemented. This new Covid reality has been a massive boon to the leading capitalist interests. Jeff Bezos is richer than ever. The Dow Jones is up 550 points as Covid deaths are rising. America’s billionaire class has added $434 billion to their collective wealth since the pandemic began in March. Covid control technologies and measures can and will be re-instituted on an indefinite rolling basis. It is too good for capital, and even though it’s bad for us psychologically, socially, culturally and politically, the neoliberal psychopolitical subject exists not for himself, but for capital only.
Over the last several decades the groundwork has been laid for an economy which does not actually need people. Capitalism places profit over people, and now people have never been more marginalized, more precarious, more in danger of dying, more in danger of eviction, and more unnecessary to the economy, since there are so many monopolies and so much has been automated. Now that people have been pushed so far into the background during the pandemic, the economy is doing better than ever, paradoxically, or at least the leading actors in the economy, like Bezos and others. And yet as people are more vulnerable and exploited in the ways I was describing, total control of them can still be rationalized as even more necessary than ever. An economy without people that is somehow doing better than ever, and a heightened control and security system kicking in when the mass of people have never been more sick or vulnerable. These tendencies fly in the face of common sense, but it is perfectly in keeping with neoliberal psychopolitics.
Just as 9/11 normalized the idea of individual indefinite detention, Covid has normalized the idea of indefinite social detention. Guantanamo Bay is the new American normal now. This has economic benefits for the capitalist class, but social and political benefits for the power elite as well—barricades, getting accustomed to lining up outside in an orderly queue, being turned into cattle in this way. And no more mass politics, no physical convention at which to contest the nomination of the unpopular and weak Joe Biden, for example.
Why is America handling Covid so much worse than any other major industrialized democracy? Partly because decades of neoliberal austerity depleted any resources and systems that would’ve helped respond to this in an effective way. But also because it’s more valuable for capital for this to be wielded forever. 9/11 was one day 20 years ago and it was used in an endless variety of ways to justify exploitation, and still is used. But as good as that was for the power structure, Covid is a new 9/11 every day for this apparatus of neoliberal capitalism to use as it sees fit. It can be used to squeeze even more money out of the mass of people and funnel it to elites like Bezos and others—Amazon has been accused of price gouging during the pandemic, because their customers are all a captive audience now. It can be used for social control to justify all kinds of surveillance, with contact tracing, and biometric control systems and so on becoming normalized.
Covid can be used to even more tightly control political demonstrations with militarized police power, limiting interaction at political conventions to make them even less democratic. The possibilities for power are truly endless, and the American elite aren’t good at much, but they are good at milking a crisis for all its worth. And Covid is the ultimate crisis because it starts again every day, so the incentive is to keep conditions in place to be able to reproduce the crisis anew day after day, week after week. It is often said, and with good reason, that the American economy doesn’t produce anything anymore—but we do produce, and reproduce, crises. And what is late capitalism if not one long crisis?
With open brutality by militarized police against people on the streets in cities all over America, from Seattle and Portland to New York and Atlanta and Chicago and Milwaukee and on and on, we are seeing the sudden return of sovereign power. Life is now openly something to be crushed down and repressed once again, not produced and reproduced. The only thing to be produced and reproduced is capital itself—which we willingly help accomplish, as a function of our neoliberal psychopolitical subjectivity.
The development of the psychopolitical tendency in neoliberalism gives the returning sovereign power the added advantage of making us think we actually deserve to exist as feudal subjects under the boot of neo-sovereign power. Our minds are now clouded by fake positive psychology—we can only see the good in everything, and since there is little good to see, we can’t really see anything, but we don’t admit this too ourselves, and we just tell ourselves to have gratitude for scraps here and there. And our eyes are blinded by psychopolitics—the self is the beginning and end of politics, so we can only look within, we can only blame ourselves when things go wrong, and all we can think to do is make ourselves even better servants of whatever power is oppressing us. It seems hard to imagine such perfectly docile subjects ever demanding an end to the totalizing dominance of Covid capitalism.
Now's a good time to do an update to this, as the World Health Organization just lifted the Public Health Emergency of International Concern for COVID-19, the CDC director Rochelle Walensky resigned and the Biden administration has/is removing all Covid-19 aid and health considerations.