1 Introduction

In the wake of pandemic threats such as SARS, H5N1 (avian flu), Ebola and Zika, the World Health Organization (WHO) has stressed the need to get ready for health emergencies caused by insurgent and resurgent infections, spurring countries to take a comprehensive anticipatory orientation. In this framework the concept of preparedness — in principle applicable to any sort of disruptive event, from natural disasters to nuclear attacks and bioterrorism — has taken growing hold (WHO, 1999, 2005, 2009; Sanford et al., 2016; Lakoff, 2017; David & Le Dévédec, 2018).

In spite of previous experiences with viruses seemingly capable of unpredictable and uncontrollable diffusion, leading to international guidelines and national plans (Barker, 2012; David & Le Dévédec, 2018; Rabi & Samimian-Darash, 2020), the Covid-19 pandemic, due to the Sars-CoV-2 virus, has caught by surprise governments and health systems all over the world. Nonetheless — or, better, precisely for that — the responses elicited are worthy of investigation, as a clue to the actual evolution of emergency approaches.

To this purpose the Foucauldian concept of biopolitical governmentality provides a useful backdrop. It has already been used to address the way preparedness affects traditional approaches that pivot on the notion of risk prevention (e.g. Bashford, 1999; Elbe et al., 2014; Chamlian, 2016; Sanford et al., 2016; David & Le Dévédec 2018). In the Covid-19 pandemic case, however, it seems to lead to opposed interpretations. For some we would be witnessing an acceleration in the biopolitical drift of contemporary societies by way of a normalization of the state of exception, the protection of health taking precedence over any other value, with a curtailment of individual rights of unspecified duration and an unprecedented extension of profiling of sensitive data (Becchi, 2020; Sylvia, 2020; Agamben, 2021). For others we would rather be faced with a biopolitical failure, governments all over the world showing contradictory behaviours and a fundamental inability to manage a health emergency hardly completely novel and unexpected (Amselle, 2020; Arminjon & Marion-Veyron, 2021; Pele & Riley, 2021).

Conflicting readings can be ascribed in part to different political standpoints, yet they are arguably related also with the ambiguity of today’s governmental rationality. On one hand, while subscribing to the securitarian logic of the governmental apparatuses emerged in the late eighteenth century, neoliberal rule has promoted a politics of personal responsibility vis-à-vis existential risks (job, health, private life: cf. Rose, 2007; Dardot & Laval, 2017). On the other, in specific cases such as vaccines, state authority has been reaffirmed time and again, with paternalistic and disciplinary approaches engendering mixed reactions, from approval to protest and non-compliance in the name of individual autonomy (Engels, 2016; Gobo & Sena, 2019; Pellizzoni, 2021). The Covid-19 emergency seems to have deepened ambiguity about the handling of risks and uncertainties, the question being whether this should be read in terms of inconsistency of behaviour or of an emergent rationale. The evidence from which one has to start is that governments all over the world have resorted to disciplinary solutions, like quarantine and restrictions to people’s mobility, while simultaneously appealing to individual and collective responsibility in following recommendations such as hand cleaning, face protections, social distancing and voluntary isolation. Likewise, existing pandemic plans have been largely disregarded, basically giving up a systematic overseeing of the progress of the infection, yet the idea of ​​vigilance has been reiterated all along the emergency (case monitoring, contact tracing, data interpretation, etc.) (WHO, 2020d).

Against this backdrop, the present work reflects on whether, in the Italian handling of the Covid-19 crisis, the securitarian framework of threat responses based on prevention (or precaution) has been confirmed or altered, and in which way. To this purpose, we first review Foucault’s insights into biopolitical governmentality and its evolution from the liberal to the neoliberal era, focusing subsequently on preparedness and its peculiarities. As we shall argue, preparedness entertains an oblique relationship with the security logic, intensifying the latter’s non-deterministic reasoning up to providing it with a new meaning, which makes it possible to talk of a “post-securitarian” take on threats. We then turn to the Italian Government’s management of the pandemic from January 2020 to July 2021, addressing the main regulatory provisions issued in this time span to understand their rationale. Results show that the response to the pandemic in Italy has been inconsistent; ample recourse to disciplinary measures created tensions with the security logic of health apparatuses, especially in the framework of a growing stress on individual autonomy and responsibilization; the preventive character of many approaches and instruments, including vaccinations, contrasts with the precautionary rationale of their actual implementation; and the limited role played by preparedness at surface level is counterweighed by the post-securitarian implications of measures, such as the zoning system, designed to chase rather than precede the virus. Likewise post-securitarian can be considered the blurring of the very distinction between biopolitical failure and success faced with a take on the threat that engenders a strengthening of trial and error, resilience and adaptation to ever-changing yet simultaneously unmodifiable existential conditions, the governmental goal becoming not the resolution of the crisis but its — potentially endless — modulation.

This paper has been written with the crisis still underway and responses evolving. Analysis and discussion are, therefore, necessarily tentative. The meaning of observed phenomena may be distorted by the closeness of outlook, regarding especially whether or not apparent inconsistencies should be read as signs of an emergent logic. Taking legislation as the focus of inquiry offers at least an objective basis for reasoning, preventing possible biases due to feelings and personal experiences. That said, we restrict in the following our analysis to the national level. The complex, often boisterous relationship between national government and regional administrations — not determined but certainly exacerbated by the emergency conditions — deserves a study of its own.

Within these limits, we believe the paper highlights relevant questions concerning the handling of new and emergent biological threats and, more broadly, the evolution of governmental powers in current societies, a better understanding of which is of paramount importance.

2 Governmentality and Biopolitics

Foucault (2008) provides the notion of governmentality with two meanings. In an analytical sense, governmentality refers to the identifiability of different government rationalities. In a historical sense, it refers to the rise of the problem of government as management of things, administration of the living conditions and health of a population for the sake of protecting and improving the state’s productive forces. Since the end of the eighteenth century, the governmental imperative becomes the public health, as instrumental to economic and social development. On this view, governmentality coincides with the rise of biopolitics. Foucault contrasts it with traditional “sovereign” power. While the latter consists in the capacity to “make die or let live”, biopower is the capacity to “make live or let die” (Foucault, 2003, p. 241); the power “to foster life or disallow it to the point of death” (1990, p. 138).

Biopolitics does not rely only on law, but on complex management procedures of administrative, organizational and institutional nature, based on expert knowledge and scientific claims (Foucault, 2007a; Oksala, 2013). Individual freedom and responsibility are no longer seen as threats to the social order but instrumental to governmental operations (Rose & Miller, 1992; Sena, 2014). Coercion becomes an option among others, such as, in the case of disease prevention, information and education campaigns or financial incentives (Foucault, 2003).

Foucault addressed biopolitical governmentality as it arose in the liberal age, subsequently turning to its transformation under neoliberal rule. A transformation, pivoting on an extension of the homo oeconomicus model to all spheres of life and a rethinking of market regulation as a purposeful construct (Foucault, 2008; Dardot & Laval, 2017), which by any evidence is still underway, with an intensification of its inherent tensions. Namely, the reduction in public spending, especially in the health sector and for non-hospital medical services, occurred in many countries in recent years in view of replacing it with privatized and customized solutions, has entailed a shrinking in the access to medication, contradicting the basic biopolitical aim of keeping healthy the productive forces, and, if not necessarily a limitation of biopower (Amselle, 2020), at least an increasing turn to indirect forms of governance. The neoliberalization of public health tends to reformulate the logic of making live or letting die in terms of freedom to cure oneself (under market conditions) or otherwise. Hence a growing stress on citizens’ self-entrepreneurship in pedagogical (education to autonomy), economic (private efficiency as a prerequisite for public efficiency), political (autonomy from state power) and technical (personalized medicine and tailor made solutions in general) terms (Rose, 2007; Dardot & Laval 2014). Such seemingly unrestricted freedom that the subject is asked to manage is however produced, organised and consumed through “an actual relation between governors and governed” (Foucault, 2008, p. 63), according to the specific historical, political and social context (Lorenzini, 2018). The logic of governing the ungovernable implies therefore a tension between enactment and steering of unrestricted subjectivities, responsibilization and freedom of choice, which may surface in sudden eruptions of protest, as with mobilizations against vaccination campaigns (Blume, 2006; Ward, 2016; Gobo & Sena, 2019; Pellizzoni, 2021).

It is against this backdrop, where the use of indirect ways of governing conducts at once assumes and triggers an unordered, if not plainly chaotic, social landscape, that the rise of preparedness and the response to the Covid-19 pandemic have to be gauged.

3 Security as Anticipation: Prevention and Precaution

Before this, however, it should be reminded that a core aspect of governmentality is anticipation (Ewald, 2002). This is hardly surprising, given that the governmental rationality emerged in the late eighteenth century conceives the dynamics of environment and population, and future in general, as eminently open (Luhmann, 1976). As a result, probabilistic and statistical anticipation of events becomes increasingly central. The dominant governmental logic turns from disciplinary to securitarian (Foucault, 2003; Lakoff, 2017). Individuals are seen not only as political subjects, “but also as living beings who, collectively, form a global mass — a ‘population’ — with a natality rate, a mortality rate, a morbidity rate, an average life expectancy, and so on” (Lorenzini, 2020, p. 41). As part of security mechanisms, preventive risk management uses statistical and probabilistic devices, based on historical incidence models of an already known disease, to calculate its future probability. Tools increasingly characterizing Western governments’ health policies, such as clinical or electronic health records, compulsory vaccination and preventive diagnosis of diseases, exemplify the application of a security approach to citizens’ health. A significant example is the first case of mass inoculation, at the end of the eighteenth century, against smallpox. As Foucault (2007a) notes, vaccination established itself in terms of risk calculation rather than medical evidence or agreed-upon accounts of its efficacy. This changed the approach to epidemics. While disciplinary mechanisms try to restrict the circulation of the disease isolating the sick from the healthy, for example through quarantine, security mechanisms allow the disease to circulate, minimizing its damage by way of action at the level of population, based on statistical estimates.

Western Europe had traditionally dealt with epidemics according to a disciplinary approach. Measures of public hygiene and preventive medicine, including vaccinations, which epitomize the biopolitical idea of ​​immunization (Esposito, 2010) have entailed a shift to a security rationale. The idea of risk prevention based on probabilistic calculations, on which such rationale has long built, has in turn been challenged since the 1980s by the notion of precaution, largely as a result of growing public discomfort with the “side effects” of technology and awareness of ecological hazards. Precaution builds on the impossibility of actual risk estimates due to inconclusive evidence of looming threats, deemed however sufficient to foster action before it is too late to avoid major consequences. The key securitarian element of precaution is “proportionality” between threat and action (European Commission, 2000; Pellizzoni, 2009). This notion entails a shift in the biopolitical account of the dynamics between population and its biophysical milieu, towards the acknowledgment of greater cognitive limits to government. Yet, precaution still subscribes to a security logic, retaining a non-deterministic connection between action and outcome and a conception of the outcome itself as bringing a process to a desired level, though by way of something less than actual calculative rationality.

Indeed, proportionality sits halfway between calculation and arbitrariness, both as regards the threat — the construction of worst case scenarios typically replacing proper data analysis — and, as a result, the countermeasure — hence numberless quarrels about the application of precaution (Pellizzoni, 2009). This determines a peculiar paradox: the more the precautionary action works, warding off the threat, the more it will appear excessive, its own success undermining rather than strengthening its legitimacy. In the case of the 2009 H1N1 flu WHO took a precautionary route, raising quickly the alert to the highest level (6 = pandemic underway). Yet, by the time a vaccine was made available the emergency was already waning — arguably thanks also to such strategy. As a result, the vaccination campaign, whose risk/benefit ratio was contested on this basis (Alfani & Melegaro, 2010; Ward, 2016), enjoyed limited success and WHO was charged with complicity with Big Pharma in leading governments to buy useless stockpiles of vaccines. WHO defended itself noting that, as long as the risk of an epidemic cannot be calculated in a strict sense, there cannot be a precise correspondence between level of alert and actual outbreak (Bourrier et al., 2014). This episode is possibly related with WHO’s delay in declaring the pandemic emergency in the Covid-19 case, in a sort of reverse application of precaution. As we shall see, the problem of proportionality became especially salient, in the Italian handling of the emergency, in the application of a zoning system for graduating restrictions.

4 Preparedness as a New Biopolitics

Preparedness stands in contrast with both prevention and precaution. As said, these differ in how they connect threat and action but assume the former to be known enough and the latter to aim at its neutralization. Preparedness differs as regard the understanding of both the threat and the response. The former is conceived as “emergent”, in the sense of a concealed growth before a sudden and potentially uncontrollable eruption, which makes it vital to detect it as early as possible (Lakoff, 2017). It is not just a matter of acting faced with limits to calculation but to catch signs of something the existence of which is not acknowledged yet (Pellizzoni, 2020a). This, in turn, is a means to a different goal, compared with preventive or precautionary action: not neutralizing the threat but modulating or “negotiating” with it. We shall come back in a moment to this point.

Before, it is important to distinguish between the overall approach to emergency and its qualifying element. As an encompassing approach, found in WHO guidelines and national plans, preparedness includes security measures (Elbe et al., 2014), such as stocks of drugs, protective tools, vaccines and other health equipment, which Lakoff (2017) and Keck (2020) regard as preventive, or evolutionary scenarios, which they consider precautionary. They however disagree on whether preventive and precautionary measures belong to a same family. Such disagreement reflects the ambiguity of measures like stockpiling, which can be regarded as preventive or precautionary according to how proportionality to the threat is assessed (with proper calculation or otherwise). More generally, the contested nature of precaution depends on the fact that, as noted, it follows the securitarian logic of prevention while parting company with the latter’s probabilistic grounds, strengthening the non-deterministic character of interventions.

Yet, the qualifying element of preparedness is “vigilance”, centred on sentinel devices. These are meant to provide early warnings of an imminent danger as a requisite for “readiness”, understood as the ability to respond promptly and effectively, hence as the operational side of preparedness (Italian Ministry of Health, 2021). This happens, for example, with the monitoring of changes in an animal population, such as a decrease in bee colonies as a sign of increasing pollution or the death of domestic animals like poultry and pigs as a sign of new pathogens. A statistical device is conceived for a world where threats can be prevented through careful actuarial and epidemiological research, as happens today with Big Data, which increasingly support choices in many health fields (Pastorino et al., 2019). A precautionary device tackles reality likewise, though in a cognitively weakened form, due to computability limits. A sentinel device, instead, is designed to elicit action when decision is necessary and urgent but knowledge is incomplete, in a deeper sense than in the case of precaution. It is not a matter of known unknowns, but of unknown unknowns (Wynne, 1992; Nielsen & Sørensen, 2017), to which neither calculation nor proportionality can be applied.

In health systems, sentinel devices are increasingly used to detect the emergence of unexpected or previously unknown pathogens. Significant for our analysis is, for example, the case of syndromic disease surveillance systems. These seek to detect signals of a new disease before a formal diagnosis, for example by looking for anomalies in the number of visits to emergency rooms for some types of illness, or in the use of certain drugs (Fearnley, 2008; Katz et al., 2011). The application of these surveillance systems in China or other countries at the beginning of the Covid-19 epidemic might have enabled the detection of an abnormal increase in hospitalizations for antibiotic-resistant pneumonias characterizing the first spread of the virus. Obviously, to contribute to preparedness, surveillance systems must be linked to guidelines and protocols indicating actions to be immediately taken by authorities. Thus, sentinel devices do not operate alone, but within a broader alert and response system, which includes decision protocols for acting before an event turns into an emergency (Lakoff, 2015).

Yet, it is not just a matter of detection devices or decision procedures. Keck (2020) points out that preparedness parts company with the “pastoral” logic of modern power, based on a control of the territory and the erection of defensive and containment structures (for example by killing millions of birds, pigs or minks to eradicate an epidemic outbreak). This logic is replaced with the “cynegetic” one of hunter-gatherer communities, where action builds on a mimetic relationship with animals and plants, trying to see the world from their perspective in a framework of negotiation and coexistence rather than domination and annihilation. This indicates that preparedness differs from prevention and precaution also regarding the eventual goal of the response to the threat. More than its neutralization, deemed impossible or even undesirable as even a threat may be turned to advantage, for example by extracting valuable elements or using it to strengthen resilience and adaptation,¹ preparedness aims at its modulation in order to make it manageable. Any security device (not only in the health field) has “administrative” purposes. For example, vaccination aims to reduce the spread of viral agents to a level sufficient to neutralize its effects on a population scale. Smallpox is the only case of virus elimination, and the goal of an eradication of infectious diseases has waned since the 1980s with the rise of new ones like Ebola and AIDS (Garrett, 1994). Yet, preparedness deploys administration, so to say, as a tactic rather than a strategy, or — not unlike what financial derivatives do with the risk of underlying assets that in turn represent risks — intensifies it, “letting loose” the threat to adjust to or negotiate with its vitality, rather than leading it to a safety threshold, whether probabilistically or otherwise. Said differently, the biopolitical logic of managing indirectly the dynamics of population and its milieu undergoes an intensification that qualitatively alters its character. More than manageable in the traditional sense of the word, these dynamics are deemed rideable or surfable by way of promptness of response, trial and error, resilience, adaptation (Pellizzoni, 2020b), with resulting relativization of the positions of acting subject and acted upon object. This weakening of ontological distinctions foundational of prevention and precaution dovetails with, and expands on, neoliberal governmentality, which, joining and drawing on outlooks on complexity developing since the 1970s, assumes that social and ecological processes are inherently turbulent and unplannable (Cooper, 2008), making a case — grown ever-stronger over time — for intuition, gambling, “vision”, adaptive flexibility, acceptance of insecurity and danger as increasing world actionability (Pellizzoni, 2016).²

In short, the governmental logic of preparedness builds on but goes “beyond security” in that it acknowledges and addresses much deeper conditions of indeterminacy than those to which security has historically responded. On the other hand, as with any anticipatory approach, applying preparedness entails selecting among a surplus of possibilities concerning the future (Luhmann, 1976). Choice is never just technical but first of all political. To make the future viable “some lives may have to be abandoned, damaged or destroyed in order to protect, save or heal other lives” (Anderson, 2010, p. 780), deemed of greater value. The biopolitical principle of “making live and letting die” thus remains in force, yet it arguably becomes increasingly unfathomable, as the process gets ever-more indirect and agency, and related responsibilities, blurred.

5 The Italian Approach to the Covid-19 Pandemic

6 Discussion and Conclusions

From the reconstruction above we can draw various indications. For a start, the response to the pandemic in Italy has been inconsistent. The inadequate implementation and updating of the national and regional pandemic plans may have played a role in this (Maffeo et al., 2021). A properly implemented pandemic plan — one that not only ensured a better coordination of emergency services but also avoided a dismantling of “territorial medicine”, occurred especially in Regions such as Lombardy as a result of many years of right-wing administrations — might have reduced the number of cases (and casualties) registered in the first phase of the infection, and hence to some extent the pace of its escalation. It goes without saying, moreover, that failure in enacting a prompt response to the eruption of the infection has entailed precise, if unacknowledged, choices about which lives could be abandoned and which had to be protected.⁹ That said, even countries, like the US and UK, provided with highly rated planning for pandemic preparedness (GSH Index, 2019) have performed poorly. This raises the question about the actual ability of emergency systems to tackle the threats against which they have been set up, and about the validity and reliability of the performance indicators against which they are assessed.

Second, recourse to measures, such as movement restrictions or compulsory mask wearing, the disciplinary character of which has been highlighted by forms of actual surveillance like the patrolling of streets and other public spaces, has been made whenever the threat seemed to be going out of control, as an immediate response. Such an approach, however, has remained in constant tension with the non-deterministic (probabilistic or otherwise) logic of security, and especially with its neoliberal declension in terms of autonomy and responsibilization. This clearly emerges from the plethora of recommendations about hygiene, self-protection and distancing, as well as from the handling on a voluntary basis of the contact tracing app and the vaccination (the exception of health personnel raising a harsh controversy). The tension emerges also from the combination of a (mostly) non-compulsory vaccination (which relies on the individual sense of responsibility and freedom of choice) and a Green Pass basically mandatory (and actually such with the “Super” version) for all vaccinable categories in order to perform a variety of activities and access a host of places and services. The requirement of paid swabs for escaping quarantine after ascertained or potential contacts with positives shows as well the hold taken by the neoliberal version (freedom to cure oneself) of the biopolitical maxim of making live and letting die.

Third, also measures like the quota system to access public transport, which should in principle be classified as preventive being based on an estimate of the transmissibility of the infection, have taken a precautionary meaning given the de facto replacement of probability with proportionality assessments aimed at balancing individual protection and limitation of contagion with social acceptability and the need to maintain basic social functionings and fostering economic recovery. This emerges most notably in the zoning system, not by chance at the centre of an endless dispute and of readjustments of its criteria based on accommodations of epidemiological and socio-economic considerations. That the progressive decrease in the rate of infections and hospitalizations coincident with its application has not lowered contestations sounds like a confirmation of the paradox of precaution hinted above. The use of scenarios has been extensive and controversial (and disconfirmed both when overly worrisome and when overly optimistic). Overall, one should therefore say, precaution has trumped prevention — with unclear results. This claim seems contradicted by the turn to vaccination, a most classic preventive instrument, as the main, if not the only, possibility for an exit from the emergency. However, the piecemeal increase in the knowledge of the virus, the experimental character of the vaccines at the moment of their introduction and the controversies over their implementation strategy (which one for which, herd effect as an achievable and desirable goal, need of new shots against new variants of the virus, etc.) indicate that its governmental rationale has been more precautionary than preventive.

To sum up, looking at the Italian Government’s behaviour, we are confronted with measures that not only, over time, move back and forth between a disciplinary and a security rationale, but the formal character of which is often contradicted or blurred by their actual working.

Fourth, what about preparedness in this context? Though heralded at documental level, it seems to have played a modest role, not only in recognizing early indications of a threat on the verge of erupting but also in the subsequent management of the emergency, as shown by the very limited success of the contact tracing app and by the fact that the new pandemic plan sets preparedness as a condition postponed to the future. This may be regarded as, and in part undoubtedly is, a specific inadequacy of the Italian health emergency system. And yet, very few are the examples all over the world of an effective contact tracing, both in itself and for an actual containment of the infection, all of which benefitting from previous comparable experiences and — according to many commentators — from social (before than written) norms facilitating its acceptance and support. Said differently, the Covid-19 story should be classified, in Italy as elsewhere, as a resounding case of unpreparedness (Lakoff, 2017), rather than otherwise.

Beneath the surface, however, the story seems to go somewhat opposite. The zoning system is a telling example. Not only was it precautionary rather than preventive in its concrete deployment, due to the little-known character of the infection and to its being designed to accommodate contrasting health, social and economic needs, but it was by design chasing, rather than preceding, the dynamic of the virus, pretty much in accordance with the agential blurring and the modulated or “negotiated” character of action which we have argued to be distinctive features of preparedness as “post-securitarian” governmentality.

Beside and beyond this example, it is the overall logic of the response to the emergency that looks “beyond security” in the sense specified above. Not only has the Italian Government, as basically any other, subscribed to the narrative of inevitability of similar crises, hence of a future bound to endless adjustments to “terrestrial forces” (Latour, 2018) or forms of “geopower” (Grosz, 2011; Povinelli, 2016) of which no neutralization is possible, whether in preventive or precautionary terms (to say nothing of deterministic ones). It is the very meaning of biopolitical failure or success that gets relative or plainly confused, as the modulation of the threat ensures in any case the strengthening of a governmentality based on trial and error, resilience, response on the spot and endless adaptation to existential conditions deemed at once ever-changing, hence unpredictable, and unmodifiable, as a reconsideration of ruling growth models and technological approaches is off the political agenda. That the state of emergency has been prolonged time and again, in Italy as elsewhere, cannot but strengthen the impression of a new socio-ecological order in the making, post-securitarian in that it builds on a security rationale yet parts company with the latter’s original ontological assumptions, acknowledges and embraces deep indeterminacy and stretches its administrative goals to an enduring, potentially limitless, modulation of the crisis.¹⁰

In this framework, the question of preparedness takes a much broader meaning than whether, to what extent and with what degree of success are emergency systems, at global and national level, reorganizing themselves to tackle insurgent and resurgent biological threats, pointing rather to the spirit of time, or what Foucault (2000, 2001) calls the “problematization” that characterizes a certain historical period — how and which problems are identified as relevant and which types of responses become conceivable. On this view, even the harsh debate between supporters and critics of the idea of a normalization of the state of exception in the traditional sense of a suspension of law for biopolitical purposes (Agamben, 2005) seems to miss the actual character of what is going on. The point is not so much that normalization changes the very character of the exception, which from a decisive political moment (as in Schmitt’s formulation) becomes a matter of everyday administration, as this feature may be claimed to be already present in the Nazi and the Fascist state. The point is rather that the current “economy” of the emergency does not follow an established pattern, being constantly readjusted to the fluctuations it itself contributes to engender in the socio-material collective comprised of humans and the virus.¹¹

It is the task of critique — again in the Foucauldian immanent sense of raising the question of “how not to be governed like that, by that, in the name of those principles, with such and such an objective in mind and by means of such procedures, not like that, not for that, not by them” (Foucault 2007b, p. 44) — to shed light on power operations that are changing under our eyes while engendering ever-more devastating social and ecological consequences.