Pandemic as a laboratory of power

Abstract

Sanitary crises are propitious moments for the experimentation of new technologies of power. In these contexts, old governance practices are put on hold and, in an emergency and exceptional character, new tactics of control and social organization are tested. The study developed in this article is based on the analysis undertaken by Foucault throughout the 1970s. He distinguished three answers: leprosy, plague, and smallpox models, associated with different mechanisms of power, namely, sovereign-legal, disciplinary and biopolitical or security apparatuses, respectively. After a presentation of Foucault's contribution, the article seeks to draw an update, continuing the project of an analysis of power. The focus is then directing to the new model of COVID-19 that emerges in the present, marked by the datification of life, the use of big data, the ubiquitous surveillance, and the algorithmic government, within a big technocratic dream, of a digitalized society, controlled and managed efficiently.