Bio or Zoe?: dilemmas of biopolitics and data governmentality during COVID-19

ABSTRACT

Heralding the self-brand of ‘K-prevention’ (nuanced with nationalistic pride in line with K-wave, K-pop, etc.), Korea has operated within two methods of articulation against COVID-19. One method involves granting the population relative freedom within the actual, physical realm, while the other method involves strengthening data surveillance within the virtual realm. This articulation of the actual and the virtual, and of freedom and surveillance, is at the core of Korea’s biopolitical governmentality, which is currently intertwined not only with an infectious virus, but also with data technology. I would like to suggest a slight silver lining with respect to the possibility of overcoming this dilemma: a dilemma that involves physical survival under data colonialism on the one hand, and freedom from data colonialism on the other – both elements complicated by the potential risk of transmission. This may be a starting point toward digital democracy in the age of pandemics: social equality for life instead of augmenting the thanapolitical database; respect toward vulnerable singularities instead of deceitful exclusion; and sensitivity toward redressing embedded inequality instead of reinforcing stigmatization. We must, in other words, reinvent an ethics of vulnerability and a politics of dependency as guiding principles for living together in pandemic times.

KEYWORDS:

• Pandemic
• COVID-19
• biopolitics
• data governmentality
• ethics of vulnerability

Disclosure statement

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

Further information

This Special Issue article has been comprehensively reviewed by the Special Issue editors, Associate Professor Ted Striphas and Professor John Nguyet Erni.

Notes

1 According to the government’s account, Korea’s situation of the national economy is in contrast to those of other countries. For instance, the average growth of OECD member countries is −.4.2%, while other powerful countries are much lower, such as Britain (−11.2%), Japan (−.5.3%), and the USA (−3.7%).

2 Anonymous testing was expanded to the general public during the third strain of COVID-19 in winter 2020. This was due to a dramatic increase in COVID-19 cases, and it has become the most urgent biopolitical task to find non-symptomatic COVID-19 patients.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yeran Kim

Yeran Kim is Professor in the School of Communications, Kwangwoon University, Seoul, South Korea. She has published a number of papers and books, including ‘Idol Republic: Global Emergence of Girl Industries and Commercialization of Girl Bodies’, ‘Eating as a Transgression: Multisensorial Performativity in the Carnal Videos of Mukbang (eating shows)’, Visages of Words (Korean, 2014), and Affect and its Voice (Korean, forthcoming). Her current research focuses on the cultural intersection of affect, communication, and society in the contemporary digital media ecology.