Pandemic, Data, and Governmentality

Data and Post-Disciplinary Governmentality

The term governmentality combines “government” with “mentality”, way of thinking: knowledge with the management of power. The relationship between forms of legitimation and technologies of power has played a fundamental role in the rationalization process of modern government.

Data has been a fundamental element of this process: statistics was born as a science of the state, as the collection of information necessary to govern populations and territories (Foucault, 2017).

In post-disciplinary societies¹, official statistics are increasingly flanked by data collected through algorithms and tracking, and surveillance by a centralized power is accompanied by more diffuse forms of control. This involves not only private services but also public services, from healthcare to education (implemented through digital infrastructures and private services).

In the schema (slide 8), surveillance and control are indeed represented together, as two sides of the same coin, although the first term implies the existence of a central surveilling subject, while the second usually refers to diffuse forms of control (as in Deleuze, 1992).

The presentation, after reviewing the analyses conducted in 2020², focuses on the fact that, in the case of the pandemic, the use and communication of data have crossed both models:

• Containment measures and vaccination campaigns require a central organization and systems of surveillance/control of information (Giddens, 1986, 1990) characteristic of the modern state, such as administrative practices, registers, and documents;

• The green pass also partly falls into these same modalities, with the important innovation of the app;

• The attempts to introduce the Immuni tracking app, with related debates and outcomes, are instead characteristic of the post-disciplinary model.

Undisciplined Numbers

As for the communication of data (the famous bulletins), the intent was probably to present governmental decisions rationally, but in a context that is no longer Enlightenment-based (for better or worse). To represent this shift, various terms are used in literature: “smart”, “dataist”, “solutionist”.

In post-disciplinary societies, truth is no longer the fundamental criterion for accepting or rejecting a proposition or a decision. Data is evaluated based on its performativity, for example, its predictive power. It doesn’t matter if it represents the world: what matters is if it produces useful effects in the world (Rouvroy, 2016; Van Dijck, 2014; Zuboff, 2019).

Once the will to truth, characteristic of modern society—and governmentality—has faded, it would seem impossible, even in principle, to produce a shared and “rational” public discourse³. All “alternative” truths have a full right to exist.

Every day, the numbers rose and fell in a suspenseful narrative, rather than within the framework of an epidemiological curve.

The data was mostly presented as if it were self-evident: there were no decisions to be made (apparently), other than those “guided by the numbers.”

“Undisciplined” numbers, however: numbers that, separated from disciplinary rules and problems, were not “within the truth of a discourse” be it epidemiological, medical, or social (Foucault, 2014). Not “data,” but “numbers”—raw, extrapolated, disseminated, reproduced, and re-inserted into the most disparate narratives.

Emblematic of this way of presenting data are the maps (slide 7) and the dashboards (even official ones: slide 19), which contribute to the illusion of self-evidence due to their visual nature, and certainly do not lend themselves to the inclusion of methodological notes or clarifications.

If the use of data can give rise to a rational debate about different interpretations and courses of action, in this case, we have witnessed an uncontrolled proliferation of narratives.

The Experts

In this way, the “debate on numbers” has obscured the one on policies and perspectives: data from the national health service, so many years later, speaks for itself.

We have seen national and regional governments embrace “alternative” scientific theories⁴, challenge experts⁵, and invalidate the very data they were responsible for collecting, trying to present it in a non-transparent way⁶.

The analysis of news headlines published between February 22 and May 15, 2020 (i.e., during the lockdown period)⁷ showed how the presentation of numbers was rarely accompanied by their scientific interpretation, contributing to a sensationalist narrative, and delegitimizing, at the same time, scientific institutions (the data is self-evident) and public debate (decisions depend on data). This latter trait is not to be specifically attributed to the Italian government or media but falls within the framework of post-disciplinary governmentality, especially on the “mentality” front and the relationship with knowledge.

A Latent Dirichlet Allocation (a topic modeling procedure) led to the identification of the themes you see in slides 13-15⁸. The representation of the graph of themes associated with the terms, in the figure above, seems to confirm the co-presence of “disciplinary” and “post-disciplinary” modalities, even in journalistic communication.

The first can be identified in the macro-cluster consisting of the themes “Measures,” (Misure) “Science,” (Scienza) and “Experts” (Esperti) (which we can call “the war on the virus”).

The second is represented by the macro-cluster formed by the themes “Numbers” (Numeri) and “Bulletins” (Bollettini), associated with “News” (Cronaca) and “Foreign” (Esteri), and which represents the data (Numbers) presented in a journalistic context and narrated in a chronicle-like manner (“the numbers of the pandemic”).

The distance between the two macro-clusters highlights the presence of two different types of news: the communication of “numbers” through bulletins, and scientific communication.

News related to the institutional management of the pandemic (themes “Measures” and “Bulletins,” in light blue) is divided between these two modalities; while “Science” and “Experts” (in yellow) mainly characterize the communication of measures (containment, hygiene, health, vaccines, etc.).

The “Numbers” theme concerns infections, deaths, hospitalizations, recoveries; that is, the numbers that were talked about every day, and that seemed to increase and decrease randomly, as in a suspenseful narrative, rather than within the framework of an epidemiological curve.

It is difficult to distinguish a data-driven public debate from targeted disinformation actions.

In a solutionist and post-disciplinary context, which “depoliticizes” numbers by making them “undisciplined,” it becomes difficult to distinguish a data-driven public debate, fundamental for democracy, from targeted actions of misinformation and disinformation. Often the narratives intertwine, or are read based on a common cultural ground.

On the one hand, the “priestly” function of experts with respect to the “cult of data,” confirmed by the frequent presence of experts even in denialist narratives, contributes to delegitimizing the system of scientific authority.

On the other hand, the interventions of open data activists, who called for the opening of the Civil Protection’s data and the Immuni app’s code, and who made an important contribution to the debate by encouraging independent analyses on (contextualized) data, run the risk of being neutralized when not explicitly misunderstood⁹.

References