Biopower and Plasma: How COVID-19 Made an ANT Theorist Stop Worrying and Love Foucault

Abstract

The article deals with some problems in the works of Bruno Latour and Michel Foucault as they considered the body and biopower. To dispose of the Foucauldian concept of biopower, Latour proposed his theory of the body as a dynamic object constantly learning to be open to new articulations. The author points out the gaps in Latour’s solution and develops her own in order to return biopower into the realm of actor network theory. The body is to be understood as the privileged object in actor network theory, while both biopower and resistance to it are two fundamental and interrelated groups of articulations that allow the body to support the unlimited expansion of the network. This theory is validated by succeeding in three tasks. The first is to show that Latour’s definition of the human body has implications that are important both for his work with biopower and for actor network theory as a whole. The body in the actor network theory has a special status compared to any other objects, and this is the very reason that the control of biopower over the body plays such an important role. Only the body possesses the necessary “bandwidth” - the ability to bring into the network what is not in it. The second task is to compare the concepts of body and biopower in Latour and Foucault and partially translate them into each other’s terms. The third and last task involves deciding whether the body resists biopower through the logic of actor network theory, or whether the acquisition of a body is the only possible act of power. The article concludes with a demonstration of how the available theoretical resources can be used to describe the current coronavirus situation.