COVID-19 proves the harms of governmentality – sacrificing the “expendable”, putting workers in harm’s way, and increasing thanatopolitics to control the population

The Coronavirus lockdowns forced people to adapt their community life as travel was restricted and public and leisure services were withdrawn. In Foucault’s (2003) framework, this meant new forms of territorial governmentality and the reshaping of the relationship between individuals and the state as the biopolitics of emergency were imposed. The lack of the usual places of interaction such as cafes, bars, pubs, Extended author information available on the last page of the article 13 C. Wallace et al. Places of worship and community halls meant that horizontal communication with friends, family and neighbours was restricted as the normal fabric of daily life was torn apart (Colombo, 2020). At the same time, vertical forms of communication from above were reinforced through rapidly implemented and perpetually changing instructions and regulations from the state (Bigo, 2021; Pellizzoni & Sena, 2021). Digital communications further reinforced the pervasive power of biopolitics through ubiquitous biosurveillance (Agamben, 2021). Indeed, digital communications became one of the only ways that the horizontal connections of community could be carried on, so that they took on enhanced importance. This paper, drawing upon auto-ethnography by high digital density households from 11 countries, considers how community was defined and redefined through the pandemic. Foucault’s concept of govenmentality is highly relevant to how the pandemic played out for actors at a micro-level of social life (Foucault, 2003). This reinforced the national field of power at one level as countries enacted extraordinary powers within territorialised national boundaries, including night time curfews, requiring permission for leaving home, compulsory mask wearing and restricting social contacts (Bigo et al., 2021). At the transnational level, the field of power included international institutions such as the World Health Organisation or the European Commission, which reinforced the technocracy of control and chivvied deviant lead- ers such as Trump (USA), Orban (Hungary) and Bolsonaro (Brazil) into line. As the pandemic progressed, “liquid surveillance” enabled by mobile digital technology to manage vaccinations, widespread testing, contact tracing and compulsory quarantines expanded. Voluntary cooperation from reflexive individuals through their “subjecti- fication” and “the active engagement of individuals in their own surveillance” (Bigo et al., 2021, p.19) became widespread as an extension of governmentality (Sylvia, 2020). It is not clear where the space for resistance might have appeared in this ubiquitous and repressive paradigm. During COVID lockdowns, " biopolitics " was a technical logic by which government by experts replaced dominated and even overrode even the state’s economic interests. This led to the daily litany of death and infection tallies, illustrative of what Agamben (2021) has called the “thanatopolitics” of the management of the population that distinguished the “making live” from the “letting die” (Foucault, 2003). Politics was reduced to “bare life” (Agamben, 1998). For example, some more vulnerable groups such as residents of care home or elderly isolated people were sacrificed to keep others alive and front-line workers such as nurses, care workers and cleaners were allowed to continue working, even where appropriate safety precautions were not fully available.