Democratic politics in virulent times: three vital lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT

This article offers three lessons for a post-pandemic democratic politics. First, the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the deep ontological entanglements of human and non-human systems: A submicroscopic agent jumping from an animal to a human host impacts human societies across the world. In the process, the virus has revealed a second lesson: Public responses to the pandemic have exacerbated already existing inequalities and fuelled anti-democratic desires for national and individual fortification. In a world where political emergencies like the pandemic are becoming more prevalent due to climatic and ecological destabilizations, there is an urgent need to promote new countervailing democratic forces. Together, these two insights motivate a third lesson: In order to address the ecological and political challenges of the so-called Anthropocene, democratic activism and political organizing must itself become more like the virus, more viral. Inspired by swarming behaviour in complex systems, a democratic politics of transformative change must give up illusions of simple solutions and central control, and instead rely on dispersed multi-sited actions happening at many scales at once, while working towards the improbable but necessary goal that these actions might, eventually, come together and bring about change at a planetary scale.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• democracy
• emergency politics
• biopolitics
• fortification
• new materialism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 There are still ongoing investigations into the origins of this new virus variant and its ‘patient zero’. See, for example, Duarte (2020).

2 For an example of how this realism leads to an unconvincing take on other scholarship, here is what Bratton writes about Foucault-inspired research: ‘Reality recedes further and further away as the insistence that it is all discourse extends all the way down. It is here that the orthodox biopolitical critique is, unfortunately, aligned with the populist Right.’ And: ‘At their extremes, both valorize political performativity over scientific empiricism, both eschew the very notion of objectivity, and both are crippled by self-paralyzing magical thinking’ (38).

3 Due to the scope and space restraints of this paper, we won’t be able to lay out a fully fledged account of our understanding of democracy here. However, for a more comprehensive take on what a ‘new materialist’ theory of democracy might look like, see Ejsing (2021).

4 For more on this point, see Karan (2021).

5 In thinking about fortification as a type of biopolitics, we are following Aradau and Tazzioli’s (2020) suggestion of ‘biopolitics multiple,’ which proposes a need to consider the numerous ways in which forms of life are apprehended and populations are governed that exceed Foucault’s initial outline of biopolitical technologies.

6 For an overview of the different numerical projections of climate-related refugees, see Luetz (2020).

7 For an insightful take on this disagreement, see the transcript from the playful reconstruction of the debate that took place between the two thinkers at Ecole des Hautes Etudes Sociales in 1903, written by Bruno Latour, Eduardo Viana Vargas, Bruno Karsenti, Frédérique Aït-Touati, and Louise Salmon: http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/downloads/TARDE-DURKHEIM-GB.pdf (English translation by Amaleena Damlé and Matei Candea).

8 Like in the case of humans, stressed animals are more prone to become sick (Asres and Amha 2014; Proudfoot and Habing 2015).

9 Another way to go here, which is not explored in this article, might also be to think about the way that comedy, or what political theorist Lars Tønder (2014) calls ‘Comic Power’, can turn critique and resistance into more joyous, perhaps even humorous, forms.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mads Ejsing

Mads Ejsing is a postdoctoral researcher at the department of political science at University of Copenhagen. His research interests lie at the intersections between democratic theory, climate politics, and political ecology.

Derek Denman

Derek Denman is a postdoctoral research at the department of political science at University of Copenhagen. He does work on the politics of fortification, in particular around borders, cities, and material infrastructures.