Trump will present another WH stunt-presser today at 4pm EDT that won’t start on time. It’s meant to divert attention from the now burgeoning COVID-19 contagion within the WH, and assure people that IMPOTUS* is “in charge”.
The presser is in the Rose Garden so there is the likelihood of more stunts including doubling down on the Michael Flynn tactic, as well as an appearance of Mike Pence. There could be also corporate toadies to praise Trump. The problem lies with running out of non-quarantining medical personnel from the taskforce, although Deborah Birx seems not to have been exposed to anything yet.
More likely there will be some announcement of the first Trump rally since his last rally in February happened while ignoring the pandemic. There definitely will be a few anti-China screeds. The largest pro-Trump PAC is already calling Joe Biden “Beijing Biden.”
Apparently all these beach strolls and armed demonstrations are a rite of passage for Trumpists where firearms are fetish-proxies for demonstrating immunity (and eugenic superiority). Those firearms demonstrations are sure convincing, just like anti-vaxxing resistance. Does the GOP believe that surviving COVID-19 is like sacrificing virgins to volcanoes.
The most important thing we learned from Foucault is that the living (therefore mortal) body is the central object of all politics. There are no politics that are not body politics. But for Foucault, the body is not first a given biological organism on which power then acts. The very task of political action is to fabricate a body, to put it to work, to define its modes of production and reproduction, to foreshadow the modes of discourse by which that body is fictionalized to itself until it is able to say “I.” Foucault’s entire oeuvre can be understood as a historical analysis of different techniques by which power manages the life and death of populations. Between 1975 and 1976, the years when he published Surveiller et punir (Discipline and Punish) and the first volume of Histoire de la sexualité (The History of Sexuality), Foucault used the notion of “biopolitics” to speak of the relationship that power establishes with the social body in modernity. He describes the transition from what he calls a sovereign society, in which sovereignty is defined in terms of commanding the ritualization of death, to a “disciplinary society,” which oversees and maximizes the life of populations as a function of national interest. For Foucault, the techniques of biopolitical government spread as a network of power that goes beyond the juridical spheres to become a horizontal, tentacular force, traversing the entire territory of lived experience and penetrating each individual body.
[...]
To consider the history of pandemics through the prism offered by Foucault, Esposito, and Martin is to arrive at the following proposition: Tell me how your community constructs its political sovereignty and I will tell you what forms your plagues will take and how you will confront them. In the domain of the individual body, different sicknesses materialize the obsessions that dominate bio- and necro-politics in a given period. In Foucault’s terms, an epidemic radicalizes and shifts biopolitical techniques by incorporating them at the level of the individual body. At the same time, an epidemic extends to the whole of the population the political measures of immunization that had until then been violently applied onto those who were considered to be aliens both within and at the borders of national territory.
The management of epidemics stages an idea of community, reveals a society’s immunitary fantasies, and exposes sovereignty’s dreams of omnipotence—and its impotence. Foucault’s, Esposito’s, and Martin’s hypotheses may posit epidemics as sociopolitical constructions rather than strictly biological phenomena, but they have nothing to do with ridiculous conspiracy theories about lab-designed viruses paving the way for authoritarian power grabs. To the contrary, they allow us to appreciate how the virus actually reproduces, materializes, widens, and intensifies (from the individual body to the population as a whole) the dominant forms of biopolitical and necropolitical management that were already operating over sexual, racial, or migrant minorities before the state of exception.
www.artforum.com/...
And in a different direction….