The pandemic state of exception: restrictions, subjectivities, and authority

Abstract

The pandemic and all of its restrictions dominated public attention and social practices for almost three years. There was declared a state of exception in many national contexts during the pandemic. A revolution took place in the governing of bodies and the obstruction of sociality or the basic togetherness of humans. In a direct, physical way, the pandemic regulations were radically individualizing to a degree that had not been seen in either normal societies or normal crises and emergencies. This pandemic condition of being exposed represented a kind of extreme object existence.

Introduction

The pandemic sent shock waves through the global society. The virus and all of its countermeasures dominated public attention and social practices for almost three years (Hale et al. 2021; Zinn 2020; Jasanoff et al. 2021), before slowly fading away. However, what truly took place and especially, what the deeper social and cultural consequences of the pandemic and the regulations are, remain very uncertain. We are left with some fundamental dilemmas. The aim of this article is to reflect upon the deeper and fundamental aspects of the pandemic, the regulations and the sociopolitical situation that were provoked, and therefore to widen the horizon of possible thinking and debate about the pandemic, including new theoretical challenges.

Normally, it is only with great difficulty that the social sciences can step out of the automatic use of the categories already employed by the administration, the political field, and the media—or more generally speaking—the actors and agents the social sciences are studying. The intellectual necessity of creating this epistemic rupture, as well as the fundamental obstacles involved, has been a major methodological issue in the social sciences (Bourdieu 1977, 1984). The methodological challenge may also be reformulated as being able to analyze the production of discourses rather than simply being an effect of them (Foucault 1975, 2008) or as being able to observe the internal codifications governing the social systems from the outside (Luhmann 1988).

However, intellectual difficulties in obtaining this epistemic break increased during and after the pandemic. There are several reasons for this. One is the intensified media coverage and political discourse following the pandemic, exerting increased pressure on any attempt to create analytical distance. It may feel like trying to get the head above the water after having been swallowed by an enormous wave. To some degree, this is a classical dilemma. Fear and danger make both popular and scholarly thinking uniform.¹ However, the overwhelming urgency, immediate social penetration, and relentless nature of the pandemic represent a sharper reality than most relevant historical parallels.

On the other hand, it is especially in times of crisis, and when the stakes are high, there is a need for a variety of fundamental optics and perspectives. Ironically, when analytical distance becomes nearly impossible, it is even more needed. The old question of the very rationale of the social sciences repeats itself, perhaps more urgently: what should be the added value of social sciences, in addition to presenting systematic analyses within the pre-existing and dominating political and administrative discourses? How is it possible to present a fundamentally different kind of reflection?

Many studies and observations are being conducted on COVID-19 and pandemic regulations within the social sciences. However, most of these studies are confined to measuring and analyzing effects within pre-established fields of research, using pre-established optics.² Although there might be some interesting pictures emerging from the mosaics, there is an urgent need to study and reflect upon the pandemic and the regulations as such, without following pre-established subdivisions, to understand whether there are some new and crucial social, political, and cultural logics emerging. This article is a small step in this direction.

The Chinese effect

The pandemic started in China (Mayer et al. 2021; Zhou 2021).³ After a period of denial and confusion, the Chinese central government took charge and initiated severe restrictions, such as lockdowns and curfews, to curb the spread of the virus. The regime was tough, and the discipline was hard and direct, involving police brutality. Some of the measures even bordered on absurdity in their theatrical strictness, such as welding doors to living quarters. The images dominated western media for weeks in the initial stages of the pandemic. They were deeply fascinating in a strange and horrific way, demonstrating cruel sacrifices of all kinds of freedoms, especially concerning movement and basic being togetherness of humans. It was like an early warning of an imminent disaster. The Chinese images created a kind of shock therapy and effect in the Western public and prepared for the early arrival and even dominance of a special kind of COVID-19 subjectivity. What started to grow was a new preparedness for deep restrictions and interventions; and a new willingness to sacrifice.

The Chinese example was certainly able to define the COVID-19 pandemic in the first months, and it is typical that Chinese President Xi Jinping was the first state leader to pick up and use the war metaphor, calling the epidemic a “people’s war” (Martinez-Brawley & Gualda 2020), soon followed by great vehemence by politicians in other nations. Therefore, it is possible to argue that there was a wave of authoritarian impulses emanating from Chinese practice to Western public and body politics, through massive media coverage. It was as if a new space of governmental possibilities was opened. Regulations and restrictions of human bodies that had been unimaginable in liberal democracies—at least in peace time—were demonstrated by the Chinese daily through mass media, and in a matter of weeks, they achieved the status of both realistic and unavoidable policy. The great majority of the European measures that were put into practice the next months—especially those most severe, such as lockdown, curfew, and isolation—followed in the same direction as the Chinese example,⁴ although in slightly softened ways.

There are many indications that it was important from a political, social, and cultural perspective where the pandemic started, therefore under which conditions the first responses were created and invented, and that we witnessed a Chinese problem definition, regulation discourse, and restriction practices that forcefully and rapidly spread together with the virus. The Chinese governmental paradigm therefore followed as a second wave—almost in parallel with the first wave of the COVID-19 virus—although it was slightly toned down and reduced in some national contexts.

In addition to specific measures and regulations, there was a new kind of governmentality spreading. Governmentality is all about how, and to what degree, the subjects are made and have become, governable—or how ready they are to be governed in all aspects of life (Foucault 1988). Therefore, it is a specific kind of subjectivity or relation between subjects on the one hand, and institutions, expertise, and government on the other. This relation was quickly and dramatically redefined by the power and influence of the Chinese example. There emerged a new and intensified readiness to be governed at the most intimate levels of human and individual life. Long-established and honored limitations were rapidly vanishing, as if they lost their relevance in the new pandemic situation.

State of exception

It could be argued that there was declared a state of exception in many national contexts during the pandemic. This implied that the underlying normality, which our juridical, political, and social regime presupposed, was perceived as gone with the collective experience of the deep destructive impacts on society of the pandemic waves (Schmitt 1996a, b/1922; Agamben 1998, 2005) and that as a result, this regime was sidelined and put out of force.

During the pandemic, there was a public and collective fear that the entire health system—especially hospitals and intensive care units—would be overwhelmed by a huge, devastating wave of infected and dying patients. The main political, as well as medical, argument behind the strict regulations was to temporarily suppress and flatten the curve of infections, so that the daily new cases would not form such a large number that the hospitals would break down under the burden.⁵ This possible situation was fuelled by famous and politically very influential statistical forecasts, and media outlets were filled with reports from hospitals where old people were dying in the corridors while health personnel were on the brink of breaking down from exhaustion. Obviously, we had a public discourse of catastrophe and extreme fear. On March 12, 2020 President Macron dramatically declared that “the nation was at war” (Or et al. 2022).⁶ What was perceived as needed during the pandemic was a collective rescue operation for the health services involving the resources and regulation of the total society.

However, it has been contested that we truly went through any state of exception. The fact that very similar expressions were used in the political and governmental declarations, as well as in the media, does not mean that the situations complied with a social scientific or philosophical definition of the term. There is a difference between popular and scholarly concepts. In political-juridical terms, the problem was located in the relation between the government and parliament, or whether the government pushed the parliament aside and took over many or most of its vital functions in the urgent situation, introducing a kind of sovereignty for the executive.⁷ To some scholars, the question of time became decisive. If the parliament was able to resume control or its normal function within a certain time span, there was basically nothing exceptional going on.

Corradetti and Pollicino (2021) argue that there is an important difference between the state of emergency and the state of exception, the first being a danger or threat that was contained and handled within the normal political-juridical regime, although admittedly with some distress and challenge. The central criterion is whether parliamentary control is regained after some time. If it is, and the extraordinary executive measures are sanctioned by parliament after some months, or may be a year or two, we may not talk about a state of exception anymore.

However, Corradetti and Pollicino’s argument implies a conflation of the time dimension, where the moment of action is reduced to what we might observe afterward. In the present, when executive actions are taking place outside of juridical regulations, there is irreducible uncertainty. We simply do not know what will happen. When the rules are out of force, they cannot provide any direction or trustworthy predictions anymore. Metaphorically, we do not know whether the ship will return to the harbor or continue the voyage on the open sea. There may be a return—or there may not. If there is, this fact may not be used to remove the uncertainty—or open sea of possible directions—that characterizes the present or the time of actual decisions. The subjective condition and experience of exceptionalism and unpredictable transgressions in the pandemic moment, may not be invalidated after the events. We cannot make the clock go backwards—even on the theoretical level.⁸

Most of the debate about COVID-19 and the State of Exception has been reduced to the formal-juridical level, as a problem concerning the relation between the government/executive and the parliament. However, this perspective is far too narrow, and it is more relevant to define the regime that is pushed aside not only in juridical terms, but also as the rules governing the normal existence socially, culturally, politically, and economically.⁹ There is no doubt that during the pandemic, there has been a revolution taking place in the governing of bodies and the obstruction of sociality or the basic being togetherness of humans. Most places there have been an extraordinary excess in the transgression of limitations that were taken for granted: who could imagine the state could tell us to stay one or two meters away from other humans, or regulating in detail how many guests you could have in your house, or even lock you up in the house for weeks and months? Until very recently, all this would have been unthinkable and beyond imagination, if it was not part of the plot in a science fiction novel, or if you were not a prisoner. The normal regime that was put out of force consisted of both explicit and implicit, formal and informal, regulations of the daily conduct of humans. The very basis of the habitual, well-known way of life disappeared in a matter of days or even hours. It is mainly at this level of subjective existence that we must look for and define the pandemic State of Exception.

In the state of Exception, there is a new kind of power revealing and expressing itself. It is both unbound and unpredictable, and in a certain sense wild, because it is not subject to the normal rules of society, whether these are defined on the formal level—as the juridical-political regime—or on the deeper biopolitical level, as the regulation of bodies. As Carl Schmitt has pointed out, this new power has two main abilities and potentials: to tell when the underlying presupposition of the normal order is no longer present, with the consequence that it must be repealed, and to fill the new, enormous gap left behind after the disappearance of the normal rules. This new power is not rule based—either formal or informal—but rather expresses something like pure decisionism. It must, because it represents at the same time the absolute limitations of rules, and their radical transgressions. These dimensions are expressed in Carl Schmitt’s concept of The Sovereign.

However, because of this extraordinary situation, there is an urgent question to be asked: what is the location of this pandemic sovereignty? Where should we look to find the authority to decide upon the state of the pandemic exception? Even on the superficial formal level, it was not always clear. Was it the executive, the court system, local governance,¹⁰ the medical expertise within the state apparatus—or the same on the local levels? In France, there was a strong centralization of extraordinary power, while in Norway, there was a messy interplay between local and central executives. In other places—such as in the USA and Brazil—there were both competition and direct confrontations and struggles between levels (state and nation) and institutions (court and government).

However, even more unclear was the question of the real and informal location of the sovereign. Who and what had the right to speak and be listened to in a privileged way and therefore had the ability and special authority to define the extreme situation—or more precisely: to define it as extreme? An obvious candidate is medical expertise, with its historical role and power in defining vital dimensions of people’s subjective, bodily existence.

At least since the breakthrough of modernity, medical power has been immense. It has exerted decisive influence on all periods of human life, from birth, via childhood, youth, and adult life until the final old age and even death. Medical power has penetrated most important social institutions, and the economic expenses it produces and demands are heavy. Despite all this, medicine has been kept—at least to a decisive degree—in its field and place in a modern, functionally differentiated society. It has taken its position among other important social systems, such as economy, law, politics, and education (Luhmann 1988, 1993a /2017, b). However, during the pandemic, something radical and revolutionary happened. Medical power became extremely visible. Nearly all the limitations of medicine as an out-differentiated system were blasted. It was similar to a river, growing immensely in record-heavy rainfall and flooding the rest of society, breaking every natural and constructed barrier. This was new. All other systems and fields of society not only had to perform all kinds of services for the medical system, as has been normal since the start of modernity, but were also effectively subdued by medical power.¹¹

In the pandemic situation, this was enhanced and expressed by an unprecedented dominance of epidemiological models, even if they were built upon presuppositions that could be highly disputed (Anderson 2021; Eichenberger et al. 2023). The media were filled with statistical forecasts that almost went through the ceiling in their unchecked exponentiality: from hundreds to thousands to millions of hospitalized and dead people. The most obvious example is the extraordinary model power exerted by Ferguson and his research group at Imperial College (Ferguson et al. 2020). Their model—which was published on March 16, 2020—changed the course of the UK policy from mitigating to suppressing the virus, which meant a dramatic turn toward harsher regulations. It was said to be equally decisive in several other nations. It may be argued that it was medical expertise that had the power to make people think about their bodies as threatened and vulnerable in an extraordinary way, thereby requiring a level of protection that the normal rules of society could not provide. The shocking and scary predictions of the epidemiological models convinced people that in the present situation, the normal way of life was too dangerous and led to a catastrophe. This is the subjective precondition for the creation of a political Sovereign.

However, this extraordinary authority was related to uncertainty at the concrete, sensory, bodily level. Despite reports from overfilled hospitals in northern Italy, most of the pandemic was not bodily experienced—although it was supposed to be situated in human bodies. For most people, the virus was hidden in the dark, causing no sensations or pain. It could not be seen, heard, felt, tasted, or touched. For the majority, the pandemic was second-hand non-experience, mainly built upon media reports¹² (Beck 1986). In many ways, the pandemic was therefore a strange anti-climax. It did not play out as the many movies and novelistic accounts of a disastrous pandemic hitting mankind. Nobody was dropping dead on the streets, and no infected corpses were lying around. Quite the opposite. The pandemic was similar to a sensory and bodily non-event. Theoretically, this could have made the pandemic rather harmless. However, the opposite happened. Without any subjective bodily signals or corrections, the situation tended to be dominated by fearful paranoia: where and what is the real danger? When and how will it strike? We know the danger is out there and literally being blinded is the worst that could happen. In such situations, there is almost a void to be filled by the Sovereign, or a collective demand for a voice that could define the situation in an authoritative and decisive way. Therefore, epidemiological models and forecasts could suddenly gain almost unprecedented power in the most acute phases of the pandemic.

Scientific uncertainty was a major and dominant issue both during and after the pandemic. It included central and important medical questions, such as infection rates or how many people in a given population were or had been infected by the virus; short- and long-term medical consequences of the disease (such as long COVID); lethality or how deadly the virus was for people in different age groups and people suffering from different medical preconditions; total death tolls or how many people actually died from the virus; spreading mechanisms of the virus; and finally, the real effects and unwanted side effects of extraordinarily rapidly developed vaccines. There was no doubt among anyone about the strategic numbers related to the pandemic being inaccurate, sometimes even bordering informed guesswork, and the general uncertainty ran so deep that under normal circumstances, it would have severely undermined the possible public role of medical models (Saltelli et al. 2023). Even well after the pandemic, for example, death tolls are calculated based on uncertain models, not on solid, robust empirical facts.

The nature of the dominant epidemiological models during the pandemic and their most important presuppositions and predictions were very fluid. They could change dramatically from one week to the next and even overnight (Engelmann et al. 2023). However, in a strange way, fluidity did not decrease the knowledge power of medical models, and deep scientific uncertainty did not undermine, or even diminish the authority of the recommendations based on them. Rather, the opposite seemed to be true. The fluidity and uncertainty were a necessary part of the unique and special kind of model power experienced in the pandemic. The absence of any solid empirical or theoretical foundation created a kind of medical Sovereign, which operated outside the normal medical regime. Because the medical models were very unstable and almost transgressive, they could express the pure and wild decisionism of the Sovereign.

This was closely related to the problem of how the obvious presence of alternative voices within the medical-scientific community, especially among epidemiologists, should be interpreted. Normally, with fundamental and all-embracing scientific uncertainty present, these voices should be given much weight and importance, especially if they represent some central research groups and institutions. Again, the opposite seemed to be the case (Evans 2022).¹³ Alternative medical perspectives on the pandemic quickly and effectively became relegated to the status of other irrelevant voices protesting and contesting from the margins,¹⁴ as is the case in most normal science (Kuhn 1970).

It could be argued that alternative medical voices were reduced to irritating noise in the public sphere. That would, however, only partly be true. There was a dominating feeling of collective and individual vulnerability, expressed in political and administrative statements during the pandemic and felt by almost every single member of society. The consequence for thinking and reflection may be that any kind of critique or intellectual distortion may feel like betrayal. The step from simply being marginal or irrelevant—which is often the fate of scientific, as well as intellectual analysis—to becoming outright dangerous, produces a different and harder condition for thinking and reflecting.

On the other hand, the involvement from the outside in normally “internal” medical affairs—especially in the scholarly struggles about how to combat the virus in the most effective and humane way—has probably been more direct, forceful, and decisive than it was in any other historical period. Political appointments and representations tilted the scholarly balances in advisory bodies, and the personalizing media gave character and direction to the strides. Even the love affairs and sexual life of the most prominent epidemiologists became hot topics. At the same time, there were very strong and almost tyrannical demands from the outside on the performance and efficiency of medicine. As a central example, research had to skip several time-consuming steps and procedures related to safety in the development of vaccines. In this regard, the media played a major role. Medicine simply HAD to deliver. In that way, medicine as a discipline became deeply penetrated (Brekke & Sirnes 2011).

Both processes—the harsh treatment of alternative medical voices in a situation of deep scientific uncertainty, and the invasion of medicine by politics and media—indicated the presence of decisionism operating beyond normal rules. Although it may be centered around medicine, especially epidemiology, it was not necessarily located within it. Obviously, medicine was the battlefield, but there were decisive external forces at play.

The interplay between medical expertise and mass media may be of special importance. Mass media provided very privileged platforms and rostrums for some experts, making them able to talk directly to the population on a daily—and sometimes hourly—basis and raising them to the level of top celebrities (Saltelli et al. 2023). There is no doubt that the mass media has created a new kind of hyperpublic medical authority. There was a new kind of direct link between the medical celebrities and the millions of isolated individuals, sitting alone, or at most together with their close family, in their apartments. It was the dominating medical voices and faces in the television—or at the front pages—that could tell people what to fear, what to hope for, how to behave, what restrictions were valid in the moment, and why these restrictions were necessary (Offerdal et al. 2021)—and the messages would change rapidly and constantly. It was the most direct display of sovereignty, deciding the fate of people almost minute by minute.

The interplay between media and medicine was very dynamic. The medical expertise functioned as a door opener for the most ruthless reportages from hospitals, about people dying in corridors when they were gasping for air, old patients already doomed when they were rolled into the intensive care units, doctors, and nurses giving up and almost—or literally—breaking down and not least the corpses heaping up outside the hospitals. It was a daily, very emotional horror show. In addition, daily updates on the latest forecasts were of the scariest kind, promising imminent, collective sufferings and deaths (Ferguson et al. 2020).

In addition to the sheer attraction of human suffering, there was a new kind of urgent need to constantly listen to and follow the pictures and voices of mass media. It could be dangerous to miss out on medical advice and messages about how to behave and what to fear. You needed to know if and how you could leave your apartment, if you could receive guests and how many, and so on—in short, the rules of the day governing your body, and what you could be punished for transgressing. Equally important and urgent was daily information about the nature and evolution of the pandemic threat. As a result, our subjectivity became sucked into media out of sheer necessity. It was as if our most important pandemic, subjective life was in the media—or media consumption—and not in the isolated appartements. They were just at the receiving end of the conditions pronounced in and by the media. It was a circular power: the new medical-media constellation defined and produced the paranoic situation, which made it dangerous not to follow or consume media intensively or to literally be swallowed by the medical-media constellation. Therefore, it is possible that the pandemic situation revealed a new kind of potent and penetrating biopolitical media power.

Agamben (1998) has created the concept, or the “figure,” Homo Sacer, which is the counterpart of the Sovereign, occupying a complementary and opposite position in the State of Exception. It represents the human condition of being totally left over to the pure decisionism of the Sovereign. In many ways, this was the human, pandemic experience. There was a pure objective condition of being exposed to any changing instructions and decisions that might appear the next hour or the next day. Where and how you could move around, who and how many you could meet under which conditions, which precautions to take, and what to fear and not to fear—all of these issues were in constant flux during the pandemic (Herrick 2023). Even if a rule was intended to last for several weeks, everybody knew it was an illusion, and that it could change dramatically overnight. There could well be a new and very different announcement next morning.¹⁵ The possibility of any foresight, and precautionary adjustments or actions, was very limited, because the decisions were not rule based, but transgressive, and therefore pure.

The next front page in the media could turn your life upside down and you had to be ready for it, even if there was no way to be prepared. This pandemic condition of being exposed represented a kind of extreme object existence. It was tendentially void and without the counterpart of inner subjective structures governing behavior because the structuring conditions were in total flux. Instead of rules or structures that could create parallel subjective, inner discipline, there was an unpredictable Sovereign that could only produce something, such as a total readiness to listen to and follow signals and declarations. This human condition may be characterized as a minimal subjective existence or as “bare life” (Agamben 1998).

The exceptional crisis

There was something extraordinary happening on the subjective level in the pandemic situation. Although it was a crisis, it was not even a normal crisis, because, in most crises, people cling together. Threats bring people closer, and they seek the intimate support and companionship of each other. “Decades of sociology of disaster have shown the invaluable importance of pre-existing and emerging social networks in providing mutual support of both practical and emotional type in the immediate aftermath of a disaster.” De Marchi (2020). Therefore, a crisis is normally deindividualizing and tends to transgress the individual into a kind of collective, warm mass of humanity. This is how we imagine economic crises, natural disasters, and even wars. You do not face a crisis alone. This also means that pre-existing informal patterns of behavior, embedded in social networks, are activated, and even strengthened during emergencies.

However, during the pandemic, the opposite occurred. We all had to sacrifice our physical being togetherness, which is at the core of “normal” crisis behavior. On the bodily level, the virus made everyone else into a threat. The normal bodily collectivity was redefined and turned into a danger zone of contamination and infection. The core of the restrictions and pandemic countermeasures was therefore to keep bodies apart. Even the social nucleus, the family, was penetrated, whether we were locked up in our houses or told by municipal, county, or government decision how many people may visit or gather. Therefore, in a direct, physical way pandemic regulations were radically individualizing to a degree that had not been seen in either normal societies or normal crises and emergencies.

Instead of physical closeness and melting pots, we experienced physical atomization.¹⁶ In that way, the pandemic was an exceptional crisis. However, it is possible that our bodily being togetherness was replaced by something else, which offered alternative ways of being together, and could form the basis of an alternative human collectivity. There is a rather widespread viewpoint that a common response to the physical distancing of the pandemic was social closeness by new means. The possibilities offered by digital technology were explored, by sharing knowledge, skills, and resources. Burke et al. (2023) studied the spontaneous creation of an online self-help group in the initial period of lockdown in March 2020 in a city in the UK. The group was immediately flooded with requests, questions, offers of help, ideas, offers of competencies and resources, etc., creating an enormous challenge of structuring and organizing, which were dealt with inventively. In Italy, since the first days of the lockdown, there have been many spontaneous initiatives, such as singing together from windows and balconies¹⁷ and arranging collective applauses dedicated to those on the front line. It was even said that “Never was a label more misleading than “social distancing,” adopted in official jargon and uncritically taken up and diffused by the media to mean physical distancing” (De Marchi 2020).

At the core of this dilemma is of course the body. It is a central question whether it is possible to imagine a being togetherness without the bodily presence, abstracted to a purely technological level. What is being—especially the social being—outside and set apart from the body? This problem is not new. It has been raised in relation to online communities, gaming, and avatars, and more generally, screen time, especially for young people. However, the problem was radicalized by the pandemic. There were no alternatives, even if you really wanted. The abstract, technological being was enforced and tended to encompass and swallow all people and the whole society, not just a subgroup of part-time volunteers, obsessed with their gaming. The questions of its possibilities, limitations, seductions, fallacies, fullness and emptiness, truths and lies, etc. became much more general and urgent during the pandemic.

Maybe we must turn to existentialist philosophy to understand some of the important dimensions of this problem. The body is not only a physical object that we can observe and diagnose from the outside. This is only a small part of reality. The body is our subjective existence, and it makes any experience of the world possible. This means that any subjectivity and experience is bodily and that the world opens and presents itself to us in and through the body (Sartre 1977). There are many ways to conceptualize electronic media, but watching other people on a screen does not offer anything like the full bodily experience of the presence of other humans. We do not experience real bodies, but thin representations—which in addition are governed by hidden algorithms.

What does it mean to separate bodies in such a decisive and total way that was done during the pandemic? Deleuze and Guattari (1984) analyze the body as a desiring machine that is constantly engaging in new connections with other desiring machines, as well as cutting old connections. The double movement of desiring machines—coupling and decoupling—is the precondition for the flow of creative life-force. This process may not be understood as any fulfillment of human needs or the realization of something we already want. It is more fundamental and situated before that (Karatas 2023). The energetic flow between desiring machines opens new fields of imaginations and significations. Therefore, this process is the creation of wishes and deeply felt needs, and the precondition of truly wanting something—in short, it is the production of human desire. In this perspective, we may ask, again, what a radical separation of bodies implies. It does not necessarily mean that our needs will not be fulfilled and that we will be denied the realization of our dreams and wishes. At least, that is not the most severe aspect. The truly important consequence is on a different level: we will flatten out without being able to really need, want or dream for something anymore, and our desire will be weaker and less energetic. The separation will strike at the creation and production of these human dimensions, and the pandemic restrictions will be followed by a gray mist that will characterize and define the pandemic subjectivity.

Although common sacrifices may—under other circumstances and under “normal crisis”—create the strongest and most powerful communities and social bonds that it is possible to imagine, what was sacrificed during the pandemic, was the very being togetherness, which is at the core of any community. Therefore, ironically, the pandemic bond is built upon the destruction of the social bond itself. The new COVID-19 community may therefore be called an anti-community. The communities of “normal crisis” may be the birthplace of new ideas and practices. The hyper-social and warm human mass of wars and natural disasters may be very creative, not only because of the destruction of the old, but also because of the intimate and intensified being togetherness. However, the anti-community of the pandemic has the opposite effect. It freezes creativity and represents a kind of collective dullness. It is typical that the optimistic reports of flows of engagements and new solutions to problems, are mostly from the first months of the pandemic (De Marchi 2020; Burke et al. 2023). Later, this was replaced by a gray tiredness and exhaustion.

In the first months of the pandemic, there were philosophers and social theoreticians that saw, in the restrictions, a great potential for radical and revolutionary changes, and creation of new avenues for egalitarian and eco-friendly developments (Zizek 2020; Latour 2021). When everything closed down and people were isolated, they thought this condition represented a possibility for a new beginning. Also, this optimism soon ended. It became evident that the restrictions did not provide any fertile soil for creative, social experiments. Quite the opposite. The pandemic society of isolated individuals slowed down collective activities, drained them of energy, and made any alternative and transgressive imaginations distant, bleak and shadow-like. Instead, we witnessed a collective numbness. The pandemic restrictions had undermined the unconscious preconditions for radical, emancipative projects. They had hit on the level of desire production.

The label “prosocial behavior” is promoted by “The Lancet Commissions (2022),” to categorize people supporting deep and penetrating regulations. However, “prosocial” is not opposed to individualism, but rather to egoism. The commission therefore leaves the analytical level and enters the field of morality, engaging in active and sharp condemnation. Analytically, the label “prosocial” may be defended by the fact that these people are willing to sacrifice their own well-being to avoid suffering and save lives (Dryhurst et al. 2020). On the other hand, they are also willing to sacrifice the social, not only for themselves, but also for all members of society. It is very difficult to see how a restrictive practice of physical and bodily separation and atomization may meaningfully be categorized as “prosocial.”

The very unpredictability of the Homo Sacer condition was especially felt at the level of bodily separation, which was at the core of the pandemic regulations. The harsh restrictions were both very intrusive and in a nearly constant flux. Even if a lockdown could last for weeks, deep uncertainty was always present. Something new and fundamental could be declared the next morning. Maybe you could meet some close friends and family outside the household—or maybe not. Foresight, experience, and embedded patterns of behavior, not to speak about habits, were of no use—but were radically irrelevant. The only subjective modus adapted to the pandemic condition was a kind of pure alertness and combined bodily and mental flexibility. This condition is very close to Agamben’s definition of “bare life.”

Arendt (1951) made a crucial distinction between authoritarianism and totalitarianism, which is important for understanding the pandemic restrictions. The natures of these two systems are very different. Authoritarianism is a very stable system, with strict rules and regulations that are harsh, but predictable and relatively lasting. Totalitarianism, on the other hand, lacks any stability and is characterized by constant transgressions. This difference is especially crucial regarding the limitations and substance of state intervention in the life of individuals. Persons living under authoritarianism will be able to know the rules of conduct and how far they penetrate their existence. It will be possible to adjust and adapt and to know how to maneuver to find a personal space. This will, however, not be the case under totalitarianism. There will be no fixed and stabilized limits for the use of state power in the personal realm. They will be transgressed all the time, and the state regulations will surround the individual with an increasingly tighter grip, penetrating ever deeper into the intimate spheres of human life. In addition, the content of the rules of conduct will be in flux. What helped you to avoid trouble a month ago, may not be of any help today. Therefore, while life under authoritarianism is restricted, but secure, totalitarianism will produce a human condition which is totally insecure, due to state interventions that are unpredictable, both in scope, depth, and substance. Using the perspective of Arendt, there is no doubt that the nature of pandemic restrictions showed clear signs of being totalitarian.

According to Arendt, the distribution of power will be very different within authoritarian and totalitarian systems. While authoritarianism is characterized by formal hierarchies and recognizable channels of decision making, the opposite is true for totalitarianism. The decisive power will be outside the formal structures, residing in the informal shadows of secret police, party forces, and task groups. They will be the dynamic element, causing constant and new transgressions. It is possible to argue that this situation also characterized the power constellations of the pandemic regimes. True power could be located to different expert groups. Despite having an unclear position in the formal state hierarchy, they were able to change the life of populations on very short notice, by issuing daily, new statements and decrees about the pandemic and how to combat it. At best, the formal hierarchy of government, ministries and parliaments tried to limit some of the excesses. However, in most cases, they sanctioned what was already, in reality, decided.

State of exception and the comparative dimension

Globally, there is a great variety of regimes, related to divergent long lasting historical trajectories and different cultural, economic, and political conditions. This is true, whether we define the regimes on the purely political level, or as we do, on a deeper and more embracive social and cultural level. However, these comparative patterns and differences seem to be disturbed and to a large degree undermined during the State of Exception.

On both sides of the divide between authoritarian- and consensus-oriented societies, the pandemic powers were concentrated in the executive branch. For example, the Italian governmental practice during the pandemic has to a large degree been based upon self-delegation by decrees that were not approved by the parliament (Corradetti and Pollicino 2021). In most West-European states, the opposition to pandemic policy was weak and marginal, the media were in tune with the government, and individuals were obedient. In fact, the divide between consensus and authoritarian societies seems to have collapsed in the context of the pandemic. If there is anything left of this divide related to COVID-19 regimes, it is possible to argue that the magnetic poles have partly shifted and that some nations have jumped from one to the other. Additionally, if we look at formal democracies with authoritarian bends, their pandemic practices were not fundamentally different from those of most Western European nations (Juraku et al. 2021). It is even possible to argue that Taiwan (Chen and Huang 2021) and South Korea (Sang-Hyum and Buhm 2021) both had fewer penetrating measures, or, that regulations were very sharp on few selected aspects—such as travels in Taiwan and contact tracing in South Korea—while the rest of society was regulated in a rather relaxed way, at least compared to democracies in Western Europe.¹⁸

These comparative paradoxes are obviously related to the State of Exception, which implies that the normal form, substance, and limitations of state interventions on people’s lives are put out of force. There will be a redefinition of the very relation between the state and the individual taking place, either for a short time span or more permanently, and this relation is at the core of the difference between liberal democracies and regimes with authoritarian bends. The result may be a blurring of this difference, which is fundamental to many political theories. To some degree, the differences between regimes seem to evaporate or at least are redefined. The reason for this is obvious. When the normal regimes—including rules governing practices and behaviors on many different levels—are made irrelevant and put out of force, then the comparative differences will vanish into a floating unpredictability, subject to pure decisions. The regimes are swallowed by the same black hole, which is the State of Exception. This means that the Sovereign, unbound by normal rules, transgresses cultural differences inherent in these rules and acquires some kind of transcendental status.

Policing and self-governance

While the normal, comparative differences between regimes regarding the substance and content of pandemic regulations, seemed to evaporate, this was not the case concerning the style of practical implementation. In fact, the enforcement of pandemic restrictions showed great national and regional differences. Electronic surveillance played a major role in China and South Korea, while an infection app for cell phones was typically stopped in Norway. In some nations, such as in China, the role of the police—including brutal direct actions—was very significant, while in the Scandinavian countries it was almost non-existent. Some European nations placed themselves somewhere in between, e.g., having police check points and patrolling. This is a description of the first lockdown in France: “The conditions of the lockdown became progressively stricter with the closure of open food markets, parks, forests, beaches, and an intensification of police controls to enforce stay-at-home policy.” Breaking the rules would result in a minimum fine of 135 Euros and a maximum of 450 Euros. After four fines, you would be sentenced to prison for 6 months (Or et al. 2022). Even this French example is a far cry from the empty Norwegian streets—not only empty of people but also of police.

In some national contexts, many oppressive measures were obviously symbolic, displaying a theatrical harshness to compensate for real efficiency. India may be the prime example of this, where the pandemic decisions of the Modi government sent millions of guest workers out on the road, walking toward their places of origin, thereby constituting a veritable giant virus flow and mass movement of hyper contagion. There was a kind of pure desire for dramatic policing of society and maybe also for the creation of social shock waves, with no considerations of medical consequences.

The presence or absence of policing and surveillance of societies may not say very much about the real social penetration and efficiency of different regulations, such as social distancing. The enforcement of behavior could be performed perfectly well by the subjects themselves. It did not necessarily need any external actors. Therefore, the harshness and tightness of policing may not be a very good indication of the degree to which the new pandemic restrictions were able to influence and dominate people’s daily lives.

Demonstrative, external forces are not the only means by which state apparatuses are able to cut deep into the social body. Another obvious alternative is self-governance, where people behave according to inner compulsions and not external control. This may especially be the case in nations culturally dominated by secularized protestant ethics (Hedlund et al. 2021; Nygren and Olofsson 2020). Normally, an inner moral voice functions as a kind of compass, telling people what to do and how to behave in different situations. The moral voice is the result of deep socialization and discipline and can have powerful inner sanctions, such as shame and especially guilt at its disposal. Therefore, the inner compass would be a functional equivalent to policing, but far more efficient.

However, individual self-governance in a pandemic State of exception is not the same as that under normal conditions. There could be no inner compass telling what to do, because the expected behavior would be in constant flux, following sovereign decisions. Certainly, the inner moral voice would be there and still loaded with weapons of shame and guilt, but it would have to be empty and without any substance. The inner moral voice is reduced to a pure alertness or moral compulsion to listen to signals and adjust in a swift and flexible way. This could be defined as a protestant, pandemic Homo Sacer—soft on the surface, but hard in consequences and efficiency.

The special case of the extremely clinically vulnerable (CEV) population in the UK is a telling example. They were under a strict regime of self-shielding or isolation, due to their medical preconditions. However, even if people did not truly belong to this category, according to official statements, but somehow felt they should, they still followed the shielding guidelines. The same applied if there was any uncertainty and confusion, and long after the official shielding policy had ended, people were still shielded (Herrick 2023). Therefore, self-governance went further and deeper, included more people, and had more fundamental consequences than any external control. The individual subjects not only listened to, interpreted, and followed the official standards and restrictions. There was also a considerable degree of overinterpretation and overfulfilling of declared and expected goals by the morally concerned individual.

Discipline (Foucault 1975) is a very relevant concept if we try to understand the subjective condition during the pandemic restrictions. The metaphor of the panopticon is central to Foucault’s explanation of the processes of disciplining humans. It is a prison-like construction, where all the inmates are strictly separated, staying in their own, isolated cell. There should be no impenetrable collectives, capable of interactions, only totally separated individuals. In the center of the construction is the guardian, capable of observing every isolated inmate, without them being able to see him. Therefore, there is a constant potentiality of being observed. You can never be sure if the guardian is looking at you. This never-ending pressure of the observing gaze internalizes the guardian and makes him part of your inner, individual nature. The paranoic situation of being surveilled will take a seat in your psyche and inner life. Until this step, the pandemic restrictions were an almost unprecedented re-actualization of Foucault’s perspective: the sinister combination of isolation, surveillance, and self-surveillance, producing fearful and docile humans.

However, the relevance of the next steps in his analyses are more mixed. The prisoners were punished or rewarded according to individual behavior, and the criteria of judgment were constant, which meant that they would be turned into parts of the inner nature of the inmates. The internalization of systematic criteria for individual behavior is at the core of Foucault’s perspective on discipline. Thereby an inner moral voice—driven by paranoia and fear—was established. However, during the pandemic this frozen system could never exist, because the rules of behavior were like an unpredictable flow. The pandemic discipline was without direction. Therefore, there could only be established an empty inner moral voice, void of substance, that told you to listen carefully to the latest declarations of how to be behave, and then follow these. However, pandemic discipline without content was an important governmental force in secularized, protestant nations. People were even overinterpreting and overdoing what they were told, and they willingly and eagerly provided the requested sacrifices—even if they were totally new and never asked for until very recently. In these cases, obsessed self-policing proved to be far more efficient than policing.

Acceptance or repulsion: long-term consequences

The intimate regulation of people’s daily lives during the pandemic was unprecedented and unheardful in many ways. To most people, it was something totally new, unexpected, and very intrusive. This, however, raises another question of at least equal importance: How short lived or lasting are the effects of these interventions? What are the short- and long-term consequences? This question can be rephrased: did subjective resistance, readiness, availability, acceptance of, or complacency for deep and penetrating bodily regulation change in any important and fundamental way during the pandemic? Or was the readiness to follow deep regulations limited and tied to the special and unique situation of the COVID -19, with no further consequences than a storm that has passed over and calmed down?

There might have been a silent acceptance of intrusive measures developed during the pandemic, facilitated by shock therapy. Without even thinking about the issue, our bodies and minds are more ready to comply, and even our immediate gut feelings—which are the necessary starting point of normative reflections—have been altered and made numb. Or maybe the very opposite has been taking place. Our bodies and minds may have grown weary and tired of intimate state interference, developing a kind of automatic repulsion and distaste. Both of these opposite tendencies may be present at the same time, in different unclear mixtures. This issue is as important as it is complex.

The Chinese health code system may be a strategic example. It signals to what degree people behave according to government health advice and rules and therefore how deserving they are. Although introduced before the pandemic, the system experienced new urgency, importance, and social penetration during the COVID-19 pandemic. It got a decisive push forward. Using different colors, the code shows in a very simple way on the cell phone the infection or risk status of each person. Although voluntary, if people were not part of the system, they were denied access to many public services, including transport. Very soon, the main issue was not the possibility of deep discipline, but the exclusion of the technologically illiterate elderly population, who therefore lost the benefits linked to surveillance (Yu 2024).

It is probable that the pandemic has made humans more governable in a general way and that it has paved the road to a more widespread and lasting acceptance of intimate, intrusive state regulations. Therefore, the pandemic may have defined a fundamentally new relation between the state and the individual, which can be characterized as a condition of indistinction between the normal and the exceptional (Agamben 1998). This may look like a contradiction in terms. However, this could imply that both explaining and experiencing situations as extraordinary—and therefore calling for extraordinarily intrusive measures—could become the new normality. The condition of society may, almost as a rule, be seen as too serious, life-threatening, dangerous, or disastrous for ordinary rules to apply. During the pandemic, the threat and extraordinary danger were seen as medical, but in future, it may equally well be economic, social, or military. There are already tendencies of almost regularly declaring States of Exception within all these dimensions, meaning that normal limitations and principles must be sidelined, because urgent threats are too special and monstrous.

The pandemic public sphere

The pandemic situation produced a clash of fundamental values. Very briefly, these could be characterized as the value of life itself and the value of fundamental life expression. More specifically, on the one hand, it was the value of vulnerable lives of sick people and of life above the age of 70, and on the other hand, it was the value of every aspect of life that involved meeting other humans outside the most primary family, especially young people. These two colliding values were impossible to compare on the same scale and both presented themselves as unique in their importance. In principle, they were both beyond, and lifted above, any relativization. Nevertheless, they would have to be relativized all the time in normal, ordinary policy, either explicitly or implicitly, because each of the “pure” alternatives would be directly destructive and cruel: letting old and weak people die gasping for air or atomizing individuals and eradicating the meaning of youthhood.

Therefore, neither of these values could be ignored without causing severe harm to human existence or the foundation of society. None of these opposing values should therefore be forgotten or marginalized in practical politics because each of them expresses the very dignity and worth of human life. Therefore, there must be compromises and politics in between. This is the very nature of normal, ordinary politics.

What happened during the State of Exception was that one of the values became the only powerful, pushing the other into the background and marginal shadows of politics. While normal politics is about compromises that nobody is content with, but that everyone can live with, exceptional politics is tendentially one-dimensional, satisfying one single value at the expense of the others. Therefore, politics become pure. At the level of values, this is the meaning of the political Sovereign. There is a sovereign value showing itself, tendentially directing all decisions. The normal checks and balances are gone. Therefore, the supreme value becomes the supreme danger. What happens to societies where fundamental dimensions are forgotten or totally marginalized? The consequences will, of course, be extremely unclear and complex, but clearly serious and very destructive.

In normal, democratic politics, clashes between fundamental values always occur. This makes the very nature of the public debate a central issue, and several central and important questions arise: Do the opposing parties truly listen to each other and do they try to grasp the full implications of the other party’s arguments about human existence and the nature of society? Do they, at least try to make some minimal efforts to follow Habermas’s precepts of being right instead of winning the debate (Habermas 1984)? A positive interpretation implies that they mostly grant basic legitimacy to opposing views and that the other party always has some important reason.

Open-minded and free communication about normative issues in the public sphere has—for many reasons—always looked overly idealistic, and to a large degree, unrealistic. It is an idea that is too beautiful for harsh reality. However, it could be argued that it has—after all—kept an important position as an ideal and has in that minimal way been able to give a much-needed direction to both public debates and democratic practices. Therefore, it is important to determine whether pandemic events led to the deterioration and closure of the public sphere, instead of surviving the challenge and proving its real, democratic strength under nontrivial conditions. Did participants in public debates truly have a serious discussion with their opponents during the pressure of COVID -19, because despite mistakes, they reminded you of some painful aspects or side effects of your own choices?

In normal political debates, there will be at least some minimal listening to the reasons of the other parties. However, this will not be the case in exceptional politics. If the State of Exception is declared facing a perceived ultimate danger, something serious happens to the very listening to arguments. The pandemic situation exhibited a kind of dominant self-referentiality in the public sphere. This means that the parties opposing the sovereign value were no longer perceived as representing different values, but rather as representing the sacrifice of the supreme value—meaning the protection of the elderly and weak. People with other opinions were portrayed as wanting to destroy what the Sovereign tried to protect.

Therefore, opposing perspectives were not understood as alternatives, which seriously had to be considered on their own merits, but were reduced to the negative side of the sovereign codifications (Luhmann 1981a, b/2018). The opponents of strict, pandemic regulations were simply portrayed as wanting to sacrifice the elderly and sick and let them die in misery in overfilled hospital corridors and not as people who tried to protect other fundamental aspects of life and society. Therefore, the atmosphere of the public, pandemic sphere may be characterized in a rather dark way: you do not discuss with the purely negative, because there is nothing to learn from evil, except that it should be avoided at all costs. From a perspective inspired by Habermas, we witnessed a radical breakdown of the communicative processes in the public sphere, where fundamental communication was not only difficult, but also unwanted. In many ways, this expresses the fate of the public sphere during a State of Exception.

There could only be two consequences of this hard closure of the pandemic discourse. Either it resulted in a situation with no public opposition, no political alternatives being voiced and an intrusive policing of the public sphere. Or—as the other possible outcome—there could be violent and hateful symbolic clashes in the public sphere, almost being pregnant with real violence. The first alternative was produced by a “successful” declaration of a State of Exception, and the second, was produced by a contested, and therefore only halfway rice of a political Sovereign, not truly gaining full acceptance for the definition of the situation as sufficiently catastrophic for the foundations of the normal regime to no longer be present.

In some places, such as in Brazil and the USA, both the institutions of the state and the public were very divided, consisting of two major parties being violently opposed to each other, almost causing a situation reminding of the early, preparatory stages of a civil war. Globally, the example of the USA was very important. Very different worldviews clashed—involving issues such as how to understand the COVID-19, and what was at stake politically, socially, and culturally. In between the increasing partisan polarizations, there was no political center or common ground, but instead a growing confusion and withdrawal from politics (Ternullo 2022). There was a strong tendency to reduce any opposition to pandemic restrictions to racism and right-wing extremism,¹⁹ as if the necessity of sociality and life expression became a racist, xenophobic principle. At the same time, the awareness of racial unequal pandemic burdens (e.g., death tolls), especially among African Americans, created questions such as: if COVID-19 deaths are a black burden, why should all the others pay for it through restrictions (Stephens-Dougan 2023)? Together, this created a very toxic public atmosphere. The public images of the “others” as monstrous became even more pronounced, clear and dominating during the different stages of the pandemic, and we could witness the rise of something not far away from the political “enemy,”²⁰ as defined by Carl Schmitt (1996a, b/1932): an existential threat.²¹ Although it could be argued that the pandemic developed into a sociopolitical showdown because the USA was already torn apart by political partisanship (Graham and Singh 2024; Bisbee et al. 2022), it is also clear that the COVID -19 pandemic enlarged, fueled, and even redefined pre-existing cleavages and frontiers (Qian et al. 2022; Brubaker 2021).

In most European nations, there was a clear political and public majority and no internal split in the state apparatuses. However, the intensity of the moral appeals of media, state leaders, medical officials, and others, revealed a very vulnerable situation. There was no calm confidence in any superior political, medical-political, or ideological strength or position, just an exalted, general feeling of fragility, as if the body politics were overwhelmed by a kind of paranoic, collective fear. During the COVID -19 pandemic any severe critique of political decisions on restrictions became suspicious and disloyal, bordering betrayal. This testifies to the inherent weakness of the political sovereign. It is born out of a general atmosphere and feeling of an imminent catastrophe, which will continue to be the very precondition of the sovereign position. The almost extreme concentration of authority during the pandemic State of Exception is therefore intimately linked to an almost total lack of solid foundation.

There simply did not exist any European, mainstream political opposition. All known dimensions of differentiating political parties—right/left, conservative/radical, green/industrialists, feminists/non-feminists, etc.—collapsed, and they all supported the restrictions. In Germany and the Netherlands, only extreme right-wing parties voiced any critique of the regulations (Louwerse et al. 2021; Segers 2021). In Norway, no party did. This is the general, European pattern: either extreme right wing or no one.²² For most people, this simply implied that the political party system had no acceptable critical alternative to offer.

It is not at all a trivial matter when very basic human needs are not expressed in the political and public spheres. There will be double closure taking place. First, there will be the harsh feeling of atomization and being cut off from social contact. Then, there will be almost no possibility of screaming out the pain, not to speak of reformulating it into meaningful propositions for improvements and change. Instead, there will have to be a silent and dumb suffering, where even thinking about alternatives will have to be a secret in case you do not want to become the victim of the most delegitimatizing accusations, as being a protofascist. The result will be a kind of unarticulated pain floating around on the subjective level. Moreover, as we know from political history, the channelizing of such streams—which can be characterized as desire turned into sharp pain—may happen in very destructive ways (Deleuze and Guattari 1984).

Restored freedom

During the pandemic situation some very intrusive restrictions on bodily movements and human being togetherness were introduced. Under normal regimes, not having such restrictions would clearly have been at the core of individual freedom and self-determination. It would belong to the very definition of both. Therefore, it is important to determine whether it is possible to fully restore freedom and self-determination in the post-pandemic world or whether something fundamental has happened that makes it, at least partly, unlikely, or even impossible. There is a dilemma: if individual self-determination is taken away for a while by the state and then given back by the state—is it still the same? Can we still talk about self-determination?

I may be relevant to use a metaphor from family relations. There is a wide range of parental authority over children. Whether something is forbidden or not, is the choice of the parents. They may say no to some acts or behaviors, but they may also allow. However, the last alternative does not represent real freedom or self-determination on behalf of the children. Quite the opposite. It is the freedom of the parents. It is possible that, in areas of life that used to be the realm of self-determination and autonomy before the COVID -19, we have ended up mimicking child–parent relations between individuals and political authorities: they “allow” us—for the time being. The question is: when we, relative to the situation, are “allowed” by the state to have self-determination—is it still the same? Obviously, it may no longer be taken for granted. It may be seen—on the existential level—not only as uncertain and fragile, but also as false and as an illusion. Unlike what is happening in the parent–child metaphor, we will not grow and become adults, which leaves the painful paradox behind. Additionally, because the freedom and self-determination of bodily movements and being togetherness are essential to human existence, we may question the possibilities of identity constructions that the new post-pandemic situation offers. They may not only be very fragile but also be illusory and fake.