The Publicness of Pandemic Security and the Shortcomings of Governmentality

dc.contributor.authorLangenohl, Andreas
dc.date.accessioned2023-11-15T10:40:16Z
dc.date.available2023-11-15T10:40:16Z
dc.date.issued2022
dc.description.abstractEmploying the example of Germany within a European context, this paper argues that government responses to the pandemic relied too much on the biopolitical governance of populations, and too little on the symbolic governance of public spheres. Based on an analysis of policy documents and their medial representation, it is found that the politics of pandemic security is focused on the regulation of population aggregates and movements (social distancing, lockdowns, border closings, etc.), resembling a quasi-Foucaultian notion of biopolitical governmentality. Confident that the crisis can be handled through a classical apparatus of security through self-conduct within an imaginary of stochastic aggregation of the social, these modes of governance paid virtually no attention to non-stochastic social aggregates, such as those which can be observed in public spheres. Yet these aggregates produced massive mobilizations against the politics of pandemic governance in liberal democracies, in the streets and on the internet. In conceptual terms, these mobilizations can be understood as an insistence on sovereign power, in Foucault’s sense, yet ‘from below’: They reinvigorate the dramatic public, as opposed to the inconspicuous circulation, as the site for claiming attention, legitimacy, and potentially disruption - in other words, for claiming sovereign power. In the final analysis, a major security problematic can be seen in the failure of the politics of governmentality to be insensitive to the politics of sovereignty.
dc.identifier.urihttps://jlupub.ub.uni-giessen.de//handle/jlupub/18644
dc.identifier.urihttp://dx.doi.org/10.22029/jlupub-18008
dc.language.isoen
dc.rightsNamensnennung 4.0 International
dc.rights.urihttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
dc.subjectBiopolitics
dc.subjectCOVID-19 pandemic
dc.subjectFoucault, Michel
dc.subjectGovernmentality
dc.subjectPublic sphere
dc.subjectSecuritization theory
dc.subjectSovereignty
dc.subject.ddcddc:300
dc.titleThe Publicness of Pandemic Security and the Shortcomings of Governmentality
dc.typearticle
local.affiliationFB 03 - Sozial- und Kulturwissenschaften
local.source.epage209
local.source.journaltitleEuropean journal for security research
local.source.spage191
local.source.urihttps://doi.org/10.1007/s41125-022-00084-w
local.source.volume7

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