Circuit Breakers and Biopolitical Strategies

Abstract

AbstractTaking as a starting point the challenge of containing the spread of epidemics, this article provides an oblique critique of the connections between biopolitics and contact tracing. Aligning the question of biopolitical strategies with epidemiology, the article follows the lines of continuity between containment strategies, contact-tracing technology, and circulations and networks. The uptake of mobile application surveillance by government entities to trace the spread of SARS-CoV-2 has seamlessly supplemented containment measures. Singapore's deployment of TraceTogether, an application developed by the Ministry of Health and Government Technology Agency, circumvents the use of geolocation tracking: formulating a network of infected bodies using proximity data, the population undergoes a topological change. Drawing on a tradition that acknowledges the transformative quality of technology and its implications on information societies, the article frames the enquiry within the parameters of Martin Heidegger's and Gilles Deleuze's deliberations on the ways in which technology is brought to bear on the biopolitical imaginary of a population. The technological rationality that, according to Heidegger, has gripped the entire horizon of thought is opened up for interruption wherever technology fails. In these slippages emerge spaces in which a critique of society's faults may be advanced. This article proposes a critical reading of application surveillance with a view to the biopolitical and philosophical implications of overdetermined network structures against the backdrop of contagion-related phenomena.