…the idiom of war between king and people draws on and is expressive of an even deeper structural reality—the ability to step outside the moral order so as to partake of the kind of power capable of creating such an order is always y definition an act of violence, and can only be maintained as such…This is not just war; it is total war. Insofar as the sovereign intends to apply such compulsion to an entire population within a given territory, it ultimately must always be. (The only limitation on such total war is that the sovereign cannot wipe out the entire population, or his sovereignty would itself cease to exist.) Hence…the tendency for modern states to frame their greatest projects in terms of some sort of unwinnable war: the war on poverty, crime, drugs, terror, and so forth
David Graeber, “Notes on the politics of divine kingship”
With the omicron variant spreading rapidly throughout the world, quickly overtaking the delta variant as the dominant strain infecting people now, the media coverage of omicron has highlighted a key motivation behind biopower, to use Foucault’s term. Namely, the health of a population becomes the justification for policies and powers that rely on the perpetuation of the very fears that lend legitimacy to the powers in the first place. These fears, however, are at the heart of sovereignty itself in that its power involves the power to kill, or it is a power at war with the very people over whom the power is wielded. Drawing from Carl Schmitt, Graeber points out that Schmitt reminds us, appearing “like some embarrassing uncle,” that “sovereignty…consists above all in the ability to set the law aside” (458). Moreover, Graeber adds, and with recurrent events no doubt in mind, when the “police regularly get away with murder [they] are simply exercising that small–but lethal–bit of royal power that has been delegated to hem by its current holder, an entity we refer to as ‘the people'” (ibid.). But such powers only emerge intermittently, and the war between sovereign power and those over whom it is exercised settles, Graeber argues, into an uneasy truce that takes on various forms including, for instance, the modern state’s unwinnable wars on ‘poverty, crime, drugs, terror,’ and omicron.
But one might protest. After all, omicron is the latest strain of covid-19, and because of the consequences of earlier strains, hundreds of thousands dead and many more suffering from debilitating forms of long covid, we should take the latest strain seriously. Perhaps we should, but what has emerged in the news coverage at least, with political powers reluctant for the moment to act, is a split between reporting on the spread of the omicron variant and the lethality of the strain. The rapid spread of the former is often cover for concerns we ought to have regarding the latter, and with this concern comes the calls for reimposing the restrictions and shut downs that were dominant for much of 2020. But the facts so far do not appear to justify any return to prior restrictions, and in fact omicron seems to be much less dangerous a variant than delta. Cases in South Africa may have already peaked, without much uptick in hospitalizations (see here, here, and here); and hospitalizations in New York are not nearly what they were in earlier waves, with earlier variants (see here). But the point is not to defeat omicron, although that is the stated agenda for politicians and those in power to take on, but rather to take on an unwinnable war and maintain the tools of power necessary to wage that war.
Returning to Graeber now, and stepping back from an admittedly frustrated take on the latest panic over omicron, the issue really is not one of defeating the virus. What is at issue is sovereignty, which Graeber defines as “the power to refuse all limits and do whatever one likes” (377). What omicron brings up with the conflation of rising infections with rising danger is the attempt to justify the exercise of power, to give non-arbitrary reasons for why one is doing what they are doing, such as imposing restrictions, lockdowns, etc. When rising infections becomes the reason for the increased panic that justifies a new round of restrictions, and without demonstrating the link between increased infections of omicron and the need for reimposing restrictions, when evidence appears to indicate that omicron may be closer to the common cold than the delta variant [see here), then what this offers is a peak under the hood of sovereign power, a look at the tendency this power has to become power without reasons, the power “to refuse all limits and do whatever one likes.” Now I may be wrong, and this post may not age well and turn out to be just a rant, and one based not in facts but rather in covid fatigue (and who is not suffering from covid fatigue nearly 2 years into the pandemic), and yet in looking for reasons (as a good Spinozist would do) in the current context I find the way omicron is being discussed now to be an illuminating window onto the exercise of sovereign power.