Governing pandemic fatigue: an International Relations case of experiential biopolitics

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic has made evident that living through a protracted global biopolitical emergency requires new theoretical reflections to make sense of what it means to govern life in a global context. As a central reference in the study of global health in International Relations (IR), biopolitical approaches have privileged a molecular-informational understanding of life as their object of governance. However, the phenomenon of global pandemic fatigue calls for a new problematisation. Experiential biopolitics is proposed here as an approach from which to recognise a limitation of biopolitical emergency governance that has resulted in a generalised feeling of exhaustion among populations subject to prolonged emergency measures. This reformulated biopolitical gaze understands human life, not only as a biological substance, but through its reflexive capacity to nurture lived experience, highlighting the entanglement of pandemic experiences and infection dynamics. The article explores experiential biopolitics through the WHO’s problematisation of pandemic fatigue. It analyses how assessing pandemic experience through behavioural insights studies enables a reflexive visibility of the pandemic event by drawing together biological and experiential variables. Subsequently, it interrogates theories of risk perception as a cornerstone in imagining the pandemic subject as a fundamentally experiential being.

Introduction

On 11 March 2020, World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus testified to the globality of the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the Covid-19 disease by declaring it a pandemic: ‘WHO has been assessing this outbreak around the clock and we are deeply concerned both by the alarming levels of spread and severity, and by the alarming levels of inaction’ (WHO, 2020h). Through an immediate qualification, he paired this scientific assessment with a concern for its potential effects: ‘Pandemic [. . .] is not a word to use lightly or carelessly. It is a word that, if misused, can cause unreasonable fear, or unjustified acceptance that the fight is over, leading to unnecessary suffering and death’ (WHO, 2020h).

The relevance of such a statement is the implicit recognition of the role of experience in the governance of the very phenomenon labelled as pandemic. Despite the biological reality of the pandemic event, its assessment remains incomplete if it ignores the experiential toll it takes on populations, whether it comes in the form of fear undermining public morale, or in the form of the acceptance of a pandemic normality not worth the fatiguing fight any longer. A metaphorical way to illustrate this phenomenon can be found in the reflection invited by Edvard Munch’s (1919)Self-Portrait with the Spanish Flu (Figure 1). Painted as the last of three infection waves between 1918 and 1920 hits Norway, Munch’s self-observatory gaze sizes up the spectator with a poignant look whose clarity contrasts starkly with the otherwise foggy impression that the painting leaves. Munch notes that ‘without anxiety and illness I would have been like a ship without a rudder’ (Munch, qtd. in Harris, 2006: 354). Knowing the event, it seems, requires a self-observatory sensibility for how it is experienced. Navigating it requires the appropriation of this experiential knowledge.

Figure 1.

Edvard Munch (1919) ‘Self-Portrait with the Spanish Flu’ (Photo: Nasjonalmuseet/Lathion, Jacques).

The WHO expresses a similar concern for the experiential life of populations in its pandemic management strategies. This is evident in a WHO report on Pandemic Fatigue (WHO, 2020b), which refers to a population-wide ‘feeling of being worn out’ (WHO, 2020b: 7). This article takes the report as a starting point from which to explore how pandemic experience emerged as a problem in global health governance between 2020 and 2021. Constituting the report into an empirical space, it analyses the rationality underlying the problem of pandemic fatigue as a case of experiential biopolitics. Before engaging with a definition of what this new term means, it is important to contextualise its emergence.

The global scale of the Covid-19 pandemic has attracted a surging interest in International Relations (IR), covering a broad spectrum variably foregrounding the problem-solving promise of an inclusion of the expertise of IR into pandemic management (Davies and Wenham, 2020), practices of health diplomacy (Elbe, 2021; Fazal, 2020), the macro-level implications of the pandemic moment for (liberal) international order (Barnett, 2020; Norrlöf, 2020), the study of pandemic securitization processes (Baele and Rousseau, 2022), or the critical interrogation of how pandemic management reproduces material, racial, gendered, and epistemological hierarchies (Elbe, 2022; Harman, 2021). Although covering widely differing perspectives, the basic biopolitical character of the pandemic seems – even without naming it as such – beyond dispute in a situation where ‘politics is deciding how COVID-19 is spreading and whether people are living or dying’ (Davies and Wenham, 2020: 1227).

However, the WHO’s perspective on pandemic fatigue contrasts strikingly with how more detailed readings of the biopolitical in studies of global health have conceptualised an ever more thorough epistemic penetration of life as an object of governance (Elbe, 2005, 2014; Harman, 2011; Lakoff, 2015; Long, 2020; Roberts and Elbe, 2017). Reflecting theoretical advances in biopolitics that suggest a transformation of the imaginary of life ¹ under emerging molecular and informational terms (Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero, 2008, 2009; see also Braun, 2007; Cooper, 2006; Rose, 2007), critical studies of global health have underwritten a ‘fundamentally bio-chemical’ (Elbe, 2021: 664) understanding of life. This changes the scale of biopolitics, moving from the statistical assessment of populations towards a focus on the molecular level, enabling a pharmaceuticalisation of health security (Elbe, 2014; Long, 2020). Deeply intertwined with this move is a reconsideration of the temporal stakes of biopolitics. As the life sciences increasingly acknowledge the biological contingency at the heart of their object (Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero, 2009: 16), informationalisation becomes a key precondition for dealing with life’s eventful temporality. At the stage of global health, this plays out in the analysis of the informationalised biological substance of pathogens through sequencing which serves to detect potential dangers (Elbe, 2021) or, moving away from the biological, through assessing heterogeneous (proxy) data to create timely knowledge of potential outbreak situations (Lakoff, 2015; Roberts and Elbe, 2017).

Deviating from the molecular-informational terms under which global health assembles life, the problematisation of pandemic fatigue emphasises a need to move (as the WHO has put it) ‘beyond biomedical science’ (WHO, 2020e). Exploring the make-up of this ‘beyond’ suggests an extension of the biopolitical imaginary of life underlying the Covid-19 health emergency, thus adding the experiential to the ‘biopolitical reconfiguration’ (Elbe, 2021: 664) in global health. Following the problematisation of pandemic fatigue as well as the knowledges and techniques through which this experience of a governed life (Lobo-Guerrero, 2016: 33) is translated into a governmental object, the article makes two main contributions to the critical study of biopolitics and global health in IR.

First, the article theorises experiential biopolitics as an emergent reflexive rationality in global health governance that deals with the immanent limitations (Joseph, 2010) of biopolitical ways of organising and administering life. Pandemic fatigue is identified as an unintended effect of biopolitical governance (see Weinfurter, 2023) that threatens to undermine its efficacy and therefore needs to be enclosed. To do so, experiential biopolitics reconsiders what it means to be alive (Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero, 2009). It expands the focus in global health on the molecular make-up of life by an assessment of how publics and individuals experience prolonged crisis periods and how they perceive risks over time. Recognising how the experiential lives of increasingly fatigued populations feed back on (biological) infection dynamics, life is understood as an object in which biological and experiential aspects are entangled. Emphasising this entanglement leads experiential biopolitics to acknowledge the reality-making quality of experience. It thus changes the level at which biopolitics engages with a reality (Foucault, 2009: 59) that is no longer sufficiently described in terms of objective biologised criteria such as infection numbers or vaccination rates. Instead, experiential biopolitics performs an ontopolitical shift (see Chandler, 2018) by observing the pandemic event from the vantage point of the multiplicity of experiences that develop towards it.

Second, in laying out this theorisation the article contributes to pluralising readings of the state of emergency in and beyond IR (Adey et al., 2015; Anderson et al., 2020; Grove et al., 2022). Contrasting with a paradigmatic reading of the state of exception that suggests its normalisation (Agamben, 2005), it observes a growing governmental awareness for the inability to maintain pandemic emergency measures for an extended period of time. Specifically, the pandemic protraction of the emergency subverts the distinction between everyday and exception and questions the desire for a quick return to normality (Zebrowski, 2019). Signalling an affective detachment, fatigue threatens the sense of urgency required to overcome emergencies (Adey et al., 2015: 5). Experiential biopolitics responds to this excess in governing through emergency (Anderson, 2021: 1360) by gauging public experiences of living through a protracted emergency.

The article outlines the argument for an experiential biopolitics in four parts. The first part uses two vignettes to illustrate how differentiated forms of awareness for pandemic fatigue play out in different contexts: the controversy around pandemic fatigue in the UK in March 2020 and the sudden Chinese departure from its zero-Covid strategy in December 2022. It then turns to the WHO’s discursive problematisation of pandemic fatigue and shows how it shifts interest from the problem of detecting the (biologically) exceptional (Roberts and Elbe, 2017: 56; see also Lakoff, 2015) to an approximation of how the exceptional situation is felt. Building on this reconstruction, the second part introduces the conceptualisation of experiential biopolitics and develops it along three constitutive elements covering its reflexive gaze, the shift within its imaginary of life, and the re-ordering of a reality to be assessed as a phenomenon contingent on experience. The two subsequent parts trace the epistemic underpinnings of this rationality. ² The third part shows how behavioural insights studies become a key technology for sensing (Chandler, 2018; Isin and Ruppert, 2020) the emergence of the pandemic through experience. The fourth part interrogates experiential biopolitics’ understanding of subjectivity through analysing how theories of risk perception depict processes of experiencing. It thus complements previous engagements with pandemic subjectivity that have emphasised the responsibilisation of subjects within a renewed governmentality of unease (Bigo et al., 2021), the mutual historical bonds between biopolitics and subjectivity (Lorenzini, 2021) and the promise of an epidemiological view of society (Bratton, 2021). Interrogating these two interrelated epistemic terrains shows how the assumption of a multifarious experiential pandemic event is practically developed into a new terrain of governance.

Problematising pandemic fatigue

Biopolitics, the political concern for life and the parallel emergence of the population as an object of government, renders the management of the ‘basic biological features of the human species’ (Foucault, 2009: 1) the central touchstone in governmental operations. Without question, the Covid-19 pandemic revalidated this outlook. Governmental apparatuses to manage the pandemic were aligned with medical and epidemiological expertise that first assembled the ‘stuff’ of the virus (Daston, 2021: S57) under molecular-informational terms (Elbe, 2021). Subsequently, reproduction numbers and vaccination rates emerged as indicators of pandemic life (Bratton, 2021; Isin and Ruppert, 2020). Furthermore, digital surveillance systems and the promotion of their use by ‘responsible’ subjects (Bigo et al., 2021), the colour-coded designation of risky places (Werron and Ringel, 2020) and the management of circulation by borders functioning as hygienic filters (Tazzioli and Stierl, 2021) spoke the language of biopolitical rationalities. In principle, these measures aimed at minimising forms of viral circulation while maintaining, as much as possible, the flow of conducive ones (Foucault, 2009: 65). As Fassin (2021) has noted, ‘[i]t is to the physical life that governments refer to when they justify their policies’ (p. 163) in the pandemic.

Notwithstanding this well-documented push towards biology, the emergence of the notion of pandemic fatigue invites a parallel line of inquiry. Two empirical vignettes help to illustrate the notion’s insistence on the experience of biopolitical governance and its salience during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Vignette 1: UK, March 2020 – before lockdown

In early March 2020, UK health secretary Matt Hancock suggests that ‘[t]he evidence of past epidemics and past crises of this nature shows that people do tire of these sorts of social distancing measures, so if we start them too early, they lose their effect and actually it is worse’ (Hancock, qtd. in Conn et al., 2020). In this, he agrees with Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty who sees ‘a risk [that] if we go too early people will understandably get fatigued and it will be difficult to sustain this over time’ (Whitty, qtd. in Conn et al., 2020). Both point to the advice of social and behavioural scientists to justify their position (Conn et al., 2020). The idea of fatigue thus enters the UK’s governmental discourse on pandemic response and becomes a factor in delaying the introduction of lockdown measures in the UK until 23 March 2020. However, invoking the scientificity of ‘fatigue’ sparks controversy. Several prominent representatives of precisely ‘the science’ invoked by Hancock and Whitty apparently feel a need to clarify their position on the newly prominent term.

Authored by three members of the Independent Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on Behaviours (SPI-B), a group of experts providing behavioural science insights to the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) that in turn advises the British government, a commentary on the UK’s pandemic response in The Psychologist (Reicher et al., 2020; see Conn et al., 2020) sketches two opposed psychological images of crisis situations. The first view sees people as ‘fragile rationalists’ (Reicher et al., 2020). Their irrational potential renders people ‘the problem in a crisis’ (Reicher et al., 2020) which must be considered when designing protective measures during a pandemic. According to the authors, this understanding was crucial ‘when strict distancing measures were delayed apparently on the premise that people would soon be “fatigued” and stop observing them’ (Reicher et al., 2020). The second image contrasts with this first figuration. Instead of posing the problem of fatigue, it underwrites the creative and resilient potential of people experiencing crises. Sub-optimal behaviour is thus ‘less to do with dysfunctional psychologies than dysfunctional systems and dysfunctional practices’ and lacking opportunity, ‘not lack of reason or willpower’ (Reicher et al., 2020).

A second commentary published in the Views and Reviews section of the medical journal The BMJ in November 2020 and with two of the three authors being members of the SPI-B argues similarly. Once again, the discussion revolves around the question of fatigue: ‘The question is whether the concept of fatigue accurately captures what is happening. This is important because it affects policies aimed at maximising adherence’ (Michie et al., 2020: 1). Reviewing data from the UK, the authors suggest that there is no evidence for ‘the kind of decreasing trend in compliance with regulations that could be construed as fatigue’ (Michie et al., 2020: 2). Instead, lack of adherence may be linked to other factors concerning capability, opportunity, and motivation – not least popular distrust in governments pursuing an unclear communication strategy (Michie et al., 2020: 1–2). The authors end their intervention by praising the WHO’s Pandemic Fatigue report for ‘suggesting ways of tackling this – even though the framing of the report was couched in terms of “pandemic fatigue”’ (Michie et al., 2020: 2).

The controversy around fatigue in the UK – first politically invoked as a ‘scientific advice’ to delay lockdown, later questioned in its scientificity, and criticised as a camouflaged political understanding of the relationship between subjectivity and crisis, and eventually re-affirmed in the form of an emergent expertise in global governance – hence marks an early concern for pandemic experience.

Vignette 2: China, November/December 2022 – after zero-Covid

While the UK controversy revolved around the question of the introduction of biopolitical measures to combat the spread of the virus, the phenomenon reappears 2 years later when China quite unexpectedly announces the relaxation of its hitherto uncompromising authoritarian variant of pandemic biopolitics in December 2022.

China’s zero-Covid strategy implied that it was ‘unknown if or when there ever will be a post-crisis mode’ (Habich-Sobiegalla and Plümmer, 2023: 196). A house fire in late November 2022 causing the death of at least 10 people and igniting the largest demonstrations in the country for decades suddenly called this assumption into question (Wong and Williams, 2022; Yeung et al., 2022; Yeung and Subramaniam, 2022). With the city of Urumqi, where the fire occurred, locked down for 4 months, several households locked into their flats in line with quarantine measures, and road closures reportedly delaying firefighters (Yeung et al., 2022), the incident provided a perfect storm for voicing discontent with the zero-Covid policy, ‘drastically underestimated’ (Wong and Williams, 2022) by the Chinese government.

Immediately after the incident, President Xi ‘pledged there would be no swerving’ (Wong and Williams, 2022) from zero-Covid. However, just a few days after, on 2 December 2022, CNN refers to European Council President Charles Michel who, after a meeting with Xi, notes ‘an unexpected acknowledgment of people’s frustration’ (Yeung et al., 2022) and sees the prospect of a relaxation of measures (Xu et al., 2022). The following week, the Chinese government announces a relaxation of some of its harshest Covid policies: lockdowns no longer cover entire cities but more targeted areas, home quarantine can replace state-run quarantine camps, and softer rules for testing apply. Officially, the government links this to the fact that the ‘virus’s ability to cause disease was weakening’ (Mao, 2022). In his New Year’s Eve address, President Xi signals acknowledgement for the hardships of the population’s lockdown experience: ‘It has not been an easy journey for anyone. [. . .] Everyone is holding on with great fortitude, and the light of hope is right in front of us’ (Xi, qtd. in Hua, 2022). While it remains unclear whether the protests triggered by public frustration with the zero-Covid approach caused the government to change course, they were certainly a factor in the sudden policy change.

The two vignettes convey different problematisations of pandemic fatigue. They enter the stage at opposed temporal junctures, and they concern different geographical locations and radically opposed political horizons – that of considering the introduction or the lifting of protective measures. Nonetheless, and precisely in their very difference, they show to what effect a differentiated awareness of pandemic fatigue plays out in different contexts. In both cases, the semantic of pandemic fatigue – once explicitly named as such, once implied by referencing a sense of frustration and the need to reinstate hope – is mobilised to recognise the limits of biopolitical governance and to advocate for an awareness of lived (pandemic) experiences.

A recognition of the problem of pandemic fatigue also underlies the WHO’s preoccupation with the issue. Responding to reports by member states ‘across the WHO European Region’ on ‘signs of pandemic fatigue in their populations’ and their ‘request [. . .] for support’ (WHO, 2020b: 4), the WHO provides expertise on the role of pandemic experiences and tries to gauge their status in pandemic management. The following section traces the emergence of this experiential expertise in the WHO. It subsequently reads this as an attempt to provide the basis for epistemically enclosing the problem of pandemic experience within pandemic biopolitics.

An emergent expertise on pandemic fatigue in the WHO

The WHO Regional Office for Europe takes up the notion of pandemic fatigue in October 2020 in a report entitled Pandemic fatigue. Reinvigorating the public to prevent COVID-19 (WHO, 2020b). Chiefly developed by WHO Europe’s Behavioural and Cultural Insights Unit, the report defines the phenomenon of pandemic fatigue and recommends a range of practical measures and best practices to member states. The report expresses a momentum of behavioural expertise and builds on a longer-term institutional effort by the WHO to engage ‘disciplines beyond the bio-medical sphere, including the social sciences and the medical humanities’ (WHO, 2021: 35). It condenses earlier calls during the pandemic for states to ‘listen to their publics and adapt accordingly, in real-time’ (WHO, 2020d) through including behavioural insights in pandemic response.

Building its assessment on ‘the results of behavioural insights surveys conducted across the European region’ as well as scientific literatures on ‘public health, health crises, resilience, trust, risk perception, cultural contexts, communication and more’ (WHO, 2020b: 6), pandemic fatigue for the WHO ‘[e]xpresses itself as a feeling of distress’ (WHO, 2020c) which may translate into a behavioural problem of demotivation to follow protective measures and to keep oneself informed about the pandemic. It ‘poses a serious threat to efforts to control the spread of the virus’ (WHO, 2020b: 6) and builds on a complex layer of ‘emotions, experiences and perceptions’ (WHO, 2020b: 7). The concrete experiential markers of pandemic fatigue are described as ‘sustained and unresolved adversity’ as well as ‘complacency, alienation and hopelessness’ (WHO, 2020b: 7). A press statement accompanying the report highlights how the ubiquitous experiential vulnerability to and affectedness by the pandemic ‘has exhausted all of us, regardless of where we live, or what we do’ and resulted in a situation in which ‘we are all weary’ and ‘feel apathetic’ (WHO, 2020e).

Interfolding the material conditions of the virus and the socio-behavioural dynamics facilitating its spread, the problematisation of pandemic fatigue is thus fundamentally ‘biosociological’ (Foucault, 2003: 250). It expands an original biopolitical plane by an experiential register that is both a result of pandemic emergency governance and a factor in its development. Its concern for how the pandemic made people feel suggests a field of intervention closer to what Foucault referred to as the ‘public’. This ‘public’ extends a biologized understanding of the population by including ‘opinions, ways of doing things, forms of behavior, customs, fears, prejudices, and requirements’ (Foucault, 2009: 75; see also Anderson, 2010: 165, 2012: 32) or, as Anderson (2012) has put it, its ‘collective affective life’ (p. 32).

As invocations of sustainment, continuous affectedness and hopelessness suggest, the experiential semantics of pandemic fatigue are unthinkable without their intricate relationship with temporality. A function of time, pandemic fatigue is modelled as gradually emergent (WHO, 2020b: 4) and resulting from the continuous protraction of the pandemic (WHO, 2020a: 5, 2020b: 16). The WHO’s occupation with pandemic fatigue may be read as a governmental attempt to come to terms with an increasing implausibility of a ‘division between the “normal” temporality of daily life and the “exceptional” temporality of emergency’ (Grove et al., 2022: 9) during the pandemic. In fact, one of the core problems that leads to demotivation is the absence of a clear distinction between normality and exception, as ‘even the most outrageous circumstances become normal when experienced over longer periods of time’ (WHO, 2020b: 7). In contrast to the affective force usually ascribed to emergency events (Zebrowski, 2019), the problem of pandemic fatigue lies in the subtle affective detachment of ‘a feeling of getting used’ (WHO, 2020a: 7) to the situation. ‘Fatigue’ thus invokes the constant suspense of a seemingly ‘endless process of ending’ (Barthes, 2005: 16; Berlant, 2011) ridded of temporal markers. Consequently, countering fatigue needs to strategize this temporal register by communicating ‘time-limited’ (WHO, 2020b: 6) roadmaps and by motivating subjects to ‘fill their time productively’ to ‘[h]elp them build more structure into everyday life’ (WHO, 2020b: 20). The aim here is not least to confront the pandemic’s challenge to self-efficacy and to restore feelings of control and self-determination (WHO, 2020b: 7, 13).

In the problematisation of pandemic fatigue, the ‘normality’ of an ‘everyday’ occupies an ambiguous space. ‘Normality’ is both, that which sustains hope while at the same time that which – if prematurely desired – exacerbates the situation and hence defers its own actualisation: ‘if people think that they are or soon will be returning to normal, their actions may hasten the onset of a second wave of the outbreak’ (Habersaat et al., 2020: 678f; see also WHO, 2020b: 16). In this regard, pandemic fatigue questions resilience’s desire to return to normality by confronting it with a need to stay with the emergency (countering fatigue is not about bouncing back but rather about pushing through). It thereby shifts the problematique of emergency by paradoxically locating its ‘disruptive potential’ (Zebrowski, 2019: 149) not in the momentary suspension of normality, but in the effects of an increasing experiential normalisation of the emergency.

Adding to resilience strategies’ chronopolitical aim of restoring a ‘“normal” temporal order’ (Zebrowski, 2019: 159), pandemic fatigue allows for assessing time as it is experienced within a stretched emergency present. While the looming pandemic potential of ‘uncertainty and disruption’ (WHO, 2020e) precludes the possibility of structuring time per se, the turn to pandemic fatigue promises a temporal meta-order. This means that it postulates a basic certainty about pandemic temporality at the level of the experiences it yields:

At the beginning of a crisis, most people are able to tap into their surge capacity – a collection of mental and physical adaptive systems that humans draw on for short-term survival in acutely stressful situations. However, when dire circumstances drag on, they have to adopt a different style of coping, and fatigue and demotivation may be the result. (WHO, 2020b: 7)

In other words, if it is not possible to orderly structure the time of the pandemic, it is at least possible to know how this absence of temporal structure impacts the experiential lives of subjects. In turn, problematising pandemic fatigue implies the governmentalisation of the question ‘What [. . .] it mean[s] to live “in” a state of emergency?’ (Anderson, 2017: 464). Assessing emergency experience becomes a way to understand the new pandemic ‘milieu of actual uncertainty’ (Rabi et al., 2022: 587, emphasis in original), to ‘anticipate unwanted scenarios and initiate mitigating measures’ (WHO, 2020f: 10), and to gauge the emergence of the pandemic itself.

Towards an experiential biopolitics

The previous section has introduced how pandemic fatigue folds an awareness for pandemic experiences into pandemic governance and how it provides a concept to think about the pandemic reordering of time and the precarious distinctions between normality and emergency. This section ties its emergence as a governmental rationality – a way of ‘thinking about a societal problem that will make its management practicable’ (Aradau and Van Munster, 2007: 97) – back to some theoretical considerations on biopolitics. The problematisation of pandemic fatigue aims at a legibility of populations and the pandemic situation itself in terms of an experiential biopolitics which builds on (1) governmental reflexivity, (2) an imaginary of life that entangles (biological) living and lived experience, and (3) a re-formulated concern for the reality of the pandemic. Triangulating those dynamics, experiential biopolitics is conceptualised as a governmental rationality that experiments with ways to reflexively observe experiences of governance. Its operation is both self-referential, in acknowledging that those experiences are an immanent effect of governmental measures, and ontopolitical, in its urge to govern a reality that is understood to be a modality of experience.

From biopolitical administration to biopolitical reflexivity

At a basic level, the concern for pandemic fatigue can be understood as a reflexive biopolitical engagement with the effects and limits of its own functioning. ³ The operation of experiential biopolitics is thus self-observatory, as it recognises that pandemic fatigue results from specific biopolitical forms of organising and administering life. Characterised by ‘invasive measures with unprecedented impacts on the daily lives of everyone’ (WHO, 2020b: 6), pandemic biopolitics has serious ‘socio-economic and psychological’ (WHO, 2020a: 7) implications. The experience of pandemic fatigue – expressed in feelings of hopelessness, a lack of control, and distress – is identified as an excessive element that ‘escapes’ the ‘techniques that govern and administer’ (Foucault, 1978: 143; see Anderson, 2021: 1360) life. While assessing pandemic fatigue thus exposes a gap in the emergency regime governing the Covid-19 pandemic, it is central to recognise that this gap is not easily filled with previously lacking information. Instead, it hints at a more fundamental limit (Joseph, 2010; Leanza, 2021): the organisation of emergency along biopolitical rationales produces an experience of fatigue which in turn undermines this form of organisation itself. Biopolitical reflexivity thus refers to the governmental gaze through which biopolitics recognises itself to be reflexively coupled with the societal problem it describes. This may be tied to Chandler’s (2014) observation of an increasing governmental awareness of complexity ‘where governance is no longer a matter of intervening in an external problematic but of self-reflexive understandings of entanglement’ (p. 51), resulting in the necessity of adopting a self-observatory and self-referential gaze (Luhmann, 1990: 182). Following Prozorov’s (2023) appeal to pay attention to how governmental rationalities develop in response to the specific qualities of the phenomenon that is declared an emergency, it is important to understand how pandemic fatigue poses a temporal irritation. It is excessive precisely because it signals the breakdown of ‘the geo-historically specific distinction between everyday and emergency’ (Anderson et al., 2020: 634). Problematising an experience that Berlant (2011) aptly captures in their notion of ‘crisis ordinariness’ (p. 10) thus heralds the potential exhaustion of both, a biopolitical form of organising life that falls short of accounting for life’s experiential capacity as well as the exhaustion of the emergency itself as the temporal container of pandemic biopolitics. An analysis of pandemic fatigue thus requires a shift in analytical focus. Contrary to the progressional normalisation of the state of emergency as a governmental paradigm, it points to an emergent governmental concern for how such a normalisation articulates itself on an experiential register and thus subverts the sovereign capacity to order time in terms of the binary distinction between emergency and normality.

Experiential biopolitics thus adopts a self-referential gaze. Its reflexive character rests upon a recognition of the limits of biopolitical ways of organising life and the time of emergency. The subsequent introduction of techniques to render pandemic experiences such as pandemic fatigue graspable can be read as an attempt to enclose this excess and to find a categorising language to governmentalise the tempo-experiential gap in biopolitics. The next sub-section explores this through the shift in the imaginary of life underlying the problematisation of pandemic fatigue.

Imaginaries of life: from the biological to the experiential

To endorse this reflexive gaze, experiential biopolitics requires an adjustment of its underlying imaginary of life. In turn, this basic assumption of what life is determines how it may be intervened upon (Foucault, 1984: 389). Classically, biopolitics articulates this ‘ontopolitical specification of the nature of being’ (Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero, 2009: 2) in biological terms. Fassin (2021) has underlined the orientation of pandemic (bio)politics towards what he and Rabinow, respectively, have characterised as an understanding of life in terms of the living (le vivant) (Fassin, 2018; Rabinow, 1998). Fassin (2021) argues that ‘especially during the first months of extreme restrictions the absolute defense of the right to life, understood as the right to be merely alive’ (p. 164) formed the basis of pandemic politics. Governing the pandemic was based on an imaginary of life that takes as its sole interest the basic generality of a common biological make-up of human beings (Fassin, 2018: 23; Rabinow, 1998: 197). Biology forms the terrain on which the compatibility of humans and virus unfolds with potentially problematic effects. Scaling up this imaginary results in a biopolitical gaze that assesses the population under epidemiological terms. Theoretically, this orientation contrasts with the complementary dimension of life as lived experience (le vécu) which emphasises how the living gives rise to ‘the experience of a singular human being who is conscious of his or her existence’ (Rabinow, 1998: 197) and who gains a biographical sense by encountering and living through a sequence of events (Fassin, 2021: 164). In contrast to Fassin (2021), who notes a ‘tragic denial’ (p. 164) of this dimension of lived experience in pandemic politics, the experiential biopolitics of pandemic fatigue instead requires an inclusion of lived experience into governmental rationalities. Seeing the population through a concept like pandemic fatigue acknowledges the importance of understanding how people ‘conceptualize the situation in which life puts them’ (Rabinow, 1998: 197) during the pandemic, marking a shift from the population to the public (Foucault, 2009: 75). The problematisation of pandemic fatigue then changes the biopolitical imaginary of life because it understands pandemic life from the vantage point of the ways in which this life is experienced. Moreover, as described above, it emphasises the counterproductive effects of a pandemic biopolitics that takes the biological as its sole yardstick. This extension of the biopolitical imaginary of life by lived experience operates not least through the novel inclusion of the scientific takes of the medical humanities, social sciences, behavioural economics, and studies in risk perception which the WHO report calls for. These scientific practices enable such an experiential way of understanding life at an onto-epistemological level (Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero, 2008: 273; Elbe, 2021: 664) and provide a way to respond to the problems posed by a direct translation of the recommendations of the biomedical sciences into protective measures. Not least, they allow for approximating the temporal dynamics that underlie the ‘process of experiencing’ (Blencowe, 2012: 20, emphasis in original) within the stretched pandemic emergency as they theorise how the experience of crisis changes – and wanes – over time and contemplate potential ways of upholding motivation.

Building on the mutual conditioning of the question of pandemic experiences and the question of objective infection numbers as it appears in the problematisation of pandemic fatigue, an experiential biopolitics thus entangles the biological living and lived experience within its imaginary of life, recognises their inter-dependent and non-linear emergence (Chandler, 2018: 108), and finds techniques for rendering this entanglement legible. While the reflexive gaze of experiential biopolitics thus implies a self-referential governmental perspective it also subsequently situates reflexivity at the heart of life as its re-assembled object of governance.

Experiential realities

Finally, this inclusion of lived experience holds the promise of a better understanding of the pandemic event as such. Starting from the problematisation of pandemic fatigue, experiential biopolitics understands the pandemic event from the vantage point of the experiences that it gives rise to. The ‘reality of the phenomenon’ (Foucault, 2009: 59) it seeks to govern is hence never sufficiently assessed by objective indicators but remains overlain by a range of subjective experiences. As in the case of pandemic fatigue, these experiences potentially give rise to behaviours that sustain the objective, biological underpinnings of the event. For experiential biopolitics, the pandemic event hence multiplies to the degree that it brings about differential pandemic experiences. Confronting the generality of the living with the singularity of lived experience (Rabinow, 1998) thereby creates a tension within biopolitical regimes. Pandemic fatigue is not about pinpointing specific positions within an overarching reality (as exemplified by the biopolitical concept of the case that articulates an individual in relation to a biological reality and as an instance of it) but about articulating a particular set of potential experiential relations that emerge towards this reality. Instead of narrowing reality down to a normalised distribution of biological realities, affirming its reflexive emergence within experience results in its multiplication. As a particular kind of perception with the potential to (de-)motivate behaviours, pandemic fatigue thus superimposes the reality of the biological event. Pandemic fatigue’s insistence on the experiential complexifies the idea of the reality that biopolitics needs to govern. Experience becomes a reality within reality that requires attention (Anderson, 2011). In an unruly governmental appropriation of Berlant’s (2011) characterisation of cruel optimism, the pandemic present is not taken to be a governmental object in and by itself but ‘a thing that is sensed and under constant revision, a temporal genre whose conventions emerge from the personal and public filtering of the situations and events that are happening in an extended now’ (p. 4). Accordingly, working on and with an event that emerges through perception requires an orientation towards the perspectives of the governed, an assessment of ‘their’ experience of reality. This understanding underlies the aim to enable the state to become a sensorial entity that should, as different documents stress (WHO, 2020a: 14, 2020b: 13, 2020f: 10) ‘put in place appropriate “listening devices” (e.g. surveys, online polls) that allow health authorities to gauge population response and behaviour in an ongoing and real-time manner’ (WHO, 2020f: 10).

The promise of an experiential biopolitics may thus be found in the technique of the event it proposes, in which the raw material through which the event is rendered ‘amenable to reflexive knowledge and practice in the face of [its] contingent, immanent and disruptive character’ (Ingram, 2019: 31) is reflexivity itself. In line with its reflexive gaze and its amended imaginary of life, experiential biopolitics as a rationality of government performs an ontopolitical work. It does so by doubting the capacity of the biopolitical apparatus to capture the reality of the population through biologized indicators and by underlining how reality itself is a result of the multiplicity of experiences permeating populations (Chandler, 2018: 20).

The next sections follow these dynamics of experiential biopolitics by looking at the assessment of pandemic experience through behavioural insights studies and at the way in which studies in risk perception approximate processes of experiencing and thereby co-produce a theory of the pandemic subject.

Surveying pandemic experience

As one of the central documents accompanying the Pandemic Fatigue report, the WHO proposes a Survey Tool (WHO, 2020g) that offers a roadmap for setting up and conducting behavioural insights surveys. The tool adopts the study design of the German COSMO (Covid-19 Snapshot Monitoring) project which explicitly set out to offer a ‘blueprint for other countries’ (Betsch et al., 2020a; WHO, 2020g: 7) and has been running weekly surveys with representative samples of the German population since early March 2020 (Betsch et al., 2020a, 2020b). It offers a standardised way to assess pandemic experience while also allowing for enough flexibility to match ‘adaptive research to a dynamic situation’ (WHO, 2020g: 3). In combination with COSMO, the Survey Tool can be understood as a technology of governance offering the ‘means of realization’ (Aradau and Van Munster, 2007: 97) to achieve the governmental gaze of experiential biopolitics. Behavioural insights surveys aim at ordering (through) experience. On one hand, they do so by translating pandemic experience into measurable units. This, on the other hand, enables a representation of the event through experience, by linking experiential and epidemiological data and hence creating a practical visibility of an imaginary of life that entangles biological living and lived experience.

COSMO stresses the novelty of the present moment. This is ascribed to changing informational infrastructures and their tendency to advance emotional, alerting, and at times false information that often leads to an ‘[e]xaggeration of risks’ (Betsch et al., 2020b: 2) as well as to the temporal stretching of the crisis (Betsch et al., 2020b: 2; WHO, 2020b: 6). In line with the Pandemic Fatigue report, COSMO emphasises the value of repeated behavioural insights to track ‘how the “psychological situation” is emerging’ ( COSMO, 2022b, author’s translation). As summarised in a Nature Human Behaviour comment, COSMO is intended as a ‘rapid evaluation tool’ (Betsch, 2020: 438) that is not least able to screen publics for the excessive margins of experiential life such as ‘suddenly increasing risk perceptions and panics’ and to use those insights to ‘minimize social disruption’ (Betsch et al., 2020b: 2; and (equally worded) WHO, 2020g: 21). As an underlying rationale, the assumption is that behavioural insights enable a more adaptive form of crisis communication (Betsch et al., 2020b: 2). Behavioural insights studies are thus one way of orienting the governmental gaze towards the experiential aspects of life. Surveying allows to ‘see things in their process of emergence’ (Chandler, 2018: 22) by continuosly identifying new issues and self-referentially gauging if ‘adverse responses to new restrictions, messages or actions taken’ (WHO, 2020g: 8) appear on the terrain of public experience.

The Survey Tool orders pandemic experience through 21 variables which set the grid for individuals to give insights about themselves, ‘based on the current situation’ (WHO, 2020g: 9). It introduces a basic distinction between a set of general questions (mainly concerning socio-demographic facts, infection history, protective and informational behaviour, and attitudes to governmental restrictions) and ‘psychological constructs’ (WHO, 2020g: 10). The latter category concerns individual perceptions and can be clustered along the lines of trust (regarding institutions, information, vaccinations, and conspiracies), risk perception (including risk of infection, capacity for protective behaviour and health literacy), and the emotional and affective relation to Covid-19 (including the affective proximity of Covid-19, personal wellbeing, and resilience). Through these categories, the Survey Tool thus pre-defines what counts as relevant pandemic experience. As such, it constitutes subjects taking the survey into objects of power to the extent that they are asked to understand themselves through external criteria (Hutton, 1988: 137; Rose, 1990: 11). Nonetheless, the position of the subject remains ambiguous since the survey depends on its introspective capacity. The subject’s ‘surplus-power’ (Foucault, 2006: 269) consists in its exclusive access to experience and its willingness to testify its subjective truth. The reflexive governmental gaze of experiential biopolitics thus remains precarious, with no way other than affirming the subject as ‘a source of knowledge’ (Prozorov, 2021: 449). ⁴

As subjective experience is considered to influence ‘protective behaviour and acceptance of measures’ (COSMO, 2022a, author’s translation), it bears a certain leverage on the event itself. This entanglement may be illustrated through the assessment of the ‘affect’ variable that takes interest in ‘the emotional side of risk perception’ (COSMO, 2022a, see Figure 2). It proceeds by asking subjects to complete the statement ‘COVID-19 to me feels’ (WHO, 2020g: 29).

Figure 2.

Survey tool questionnaire, assessment of ‘affect’ (WHO, 2020g: 29).

The assessment of ‘affect’ illustrates how capturing experience is also about capturing the more-than-biological reality of the pandemic event. It suggests a reading of the event as a dynamic psycho-geography, reflected in the way its proximity feels, the experience of the velocity by which it spreads, the emotions it induces, and the subjective reactions it provokes. The reality of the biological event is hence doubled by the experiential reflection of it. Experiences are no longer elements essentially contradicting the territorialized ‘general policies of management’ (Bigo et al., 2021: 477) by their transversal character. Instead, translated into a measurable unit, lived experiences of the pandemic become a factor in the functioning of pandemic biopolitics.

To understand the ‘sensory power’ (Isin and Ruppert, 2020) of experiential biopolitics, it is thus necessary to move from the infrastructural dispersal of (technical) sensors throughout societal space to a focus on the sensorial itself. Adding to the understanding of sensory power, experiential biopolitics is not merely about ‘making people sense-able’ (Isin and Ruppert, 2020: 2), but it is crucially about utilising the subject within its originally sensorial capacity – deriving etymologically from the Latin sentire ‘to perceive, feel’ (Online Etymology Dictionary, 2022) – as a sensor in and by itself. Folding thus happens twice, when external categories are folded onto experiential life and as internal experience is folded back onto an understanding of the event.

Scaling up individual experiences to a collective, aggregated level makes it possible to ‘[e]xplore the relationship of psychological variables [. . .] with the epidemiological situation and the events and measures taken’ (WHO, 2020g: 7; see also Betsch et al., 2020b: 1). This results in a way of mapping the course of experiences – for example affective risk perceptions – onto the course of infection dynamics and to represent ‘the pulse of the community’ (WHO, 2020e, see Figure 3).

Figure 3.

COSMO’s depiction of affective risk in relation to infection dynamics over time (COSMO, 2022a).

Representing the development of lived pandemic experience over time and correlating it with biologically grounded infection numbers renders an entangled imaginary of life visible (see Dean, 2010: 41). Experience then becomes a reality within and towards the pandemic. It complexifies a biopolitical governmental gaze, enabling it to see the pandemic through experience and making reality graspable as an entity that is being perceived, processed, and felt by subjects. Rather than postulating causalities, the main interest here is on depicting the experiential correlates of the pandemic situation and on adding a layer to the view of its emergence (Chandler, 2018: 89). Gauging experience in this form renders the governmental gaze reflexive in a double sense. First, it enables a self-observation of the limits of protective measures, by asking how subjects experience those measures and by examining this experience for potential negative effects (for example, by checking experiential variables as a ‘warning sign’ (WHO, 2020a: 12) of emerging mental health problems). Second, it creates a visibility of the reflexive character of the pandemic event itself, by providing an integrated view of biological and experiential markers.

Gauging the pandemic subject

This last section focuses on the understanding of the pandemic subject underlying the problematisation of pandemic fatigue. It takes studies in risk perception and their translation into the more practice-oriented literatures on risk and crisis communication as a starting point to explore this figuration. These literatures are frequently quoted as the intellectual basis of behavioural insights studies. Moving from an interest in the distribution of experiential contents (as in the case of the Survey Tool and the visualisations of the COSMO project) to the more fundamental quest of gauging how processes of experiencing underlying lived experience work under pandemic conditions, these studies can be understood as modes of objectification of the subject (Foucault, 1982: 777). They provide the epistemic resources ‘by which the subject is defined and transformed’ (Foucault, 1993: 223). Studies in risk perception thereby significantly differ from an understanding of ‘the rational subject that seems to govern itself without affects or emotions’ (Isin, 2004: 221). Rather, they seek to approximate those ‘spheres of human experience’ that seem to ‘resist quantification, although they may bear crucially on people’s perception of risk’ (Jasanoff, 1998: 98). The understanding of subjectivity in studies of risk perception thus blurs the boundaries between rationality and irrationality and destabilises the gap between reality and its experience. It thereby endows the rationality of experiential biopolitics with an adequate theory of the subject.

The central problem identified in pandemic risk perception is that ‘how people perceive risk is not necessarily correlated with the actual risk’ (Betsch et al., 2020a). Pandemic fatigue is problematised for the apparent decoupling of risk perception – generally defined as a ‘subjective psychological construct’ (Dryhurst et al., 2020: 995, see also Van der Pligt, 1996) – from epidemiological developments and the resultant lowered capacity to be affected by crisis communication messages (WHO, 2020b: 7). As such, the problematisation follows the ‘tendency to treat risk perception as a topic in the sociology of error’ (Jasanoff, 1998: 92). The persistence of a flawed perception in reality however feeds back on reality by discouraging protective behaviours (Betsch et al., 2020a). Risk perceptions thus become a ‘source of risk in themselves’ (Power, 2007: 21). In the words of an influential article, ‘[w]hether accurate or not, the public’s perception is its reality. If the public believes a risk exists, it can be expected to act according to that belief’ (Seeger, 2006: 239). Insisting on this power of perception to change reality, the basic outlook of risk perception thus validates experiential biopolitics’ ontopolitical affirmation of lived experience as an irreducible part of what defines an event.

Rendering the subject of risk perception intelligible hinges on a basic juxtaposition between analysis, reflection, and reason on one hand and feeling, emotion, and experience on the other (see Michie et al., 2014; Renn, 2008; Seeger, 2006; Slovic and Peters, 2006). In their influential account, Slovic and Peters (2006) differentiate between risk as analysis and risk as feelings. While risk as analysis allows ‘logic, reason, and scientific deliberation to bear on risk assessment’, ‘[m]ost risk analysis in daily life is handled quickly and automatically by feelings arising from what is known as the “experiential” mode of thinking’ (Slovic and Peters, 2006: 322; see also Renn, 2008: 85–86). This latter pool – risk as feeling – comprises a continuum of emotions that inform action, stemming from ‘[s]trong visceral emotions such as fear and anger’ to ‘much subtler feelings’ (Slovic and Peters, 2006: 322). The WHO’s problematisation of pandemic fatigue mirrors this basic distinction. It differentiates between reflective and automatic forms of decision making (WHO, 2020b: 8) to understand (de-)motivation. While the former category stresses intentional plan making, the latter highlights how ‘emotional reactions, desires (wants and needs), impulses, inhibitions, drive states and reflex responses’ (Michie et al., 2014: 63) mediate actions. In their attempt to objectify the subject, studies in risk perception thus emphasise the very subjective factors at work when subjects perceive a situation as more or less risky.

Meandering between reflection and feeling, the subject of risk perception maintains an ambiguous relation to rationality. Rather than conceiving of affective and emotional components as excessive, studies in risk perception try to assess them as fundamental properties of subjects. In fact, they hold that ‘there are strong elements of rationality in both systems’ (Slovic and Peters, 2006: 322). Risk as feeling potentially even offers ‘a quicker, easier, and more efficient way to navigate in a complex, uncertain, and sometimes dangerous world’ (Slovic and Peters, 2006: 322). If mobilised, the velocity of the experiential system may thus prove to be an efficiency inducing channel today, just as it ‘enabled human beings to survive as they evolved’ through ‘[i]ntuition, instinct, and gut feeling’ (Slovic and Peters, 2006: 322).

The recognition of this unexpected rationality is subsequently taken up in the field of risk communication. On one hand, risk communication builds on a substantive understanding of what constitutes the actual risk in a particular situation and tries to harmonise this with risk perceptions. To achieve this rationalisation, however, it needs to take into account and strategise the experiential elements that the subject of risk perception hinges on by addressing ‘the affect necessary to motivate proper action’ (Slovic and Peters, 2006: 325). Required to ‘appeal to reason and emotion’ (Reynolds and Seeger, 2005: 45), risk communication becomes a balancing act on the search for an equilibrium between ‘peripheral cues to initiate interest’ and ‘enough “rational” argumentation to satisfy the audience with central interest in the subject’ (Renn, 2008: 86). The Pandemic Fatigue report acknowledges this concern when it points out that ‘emotions and contextual factors can have a greater impact on behaviours than knowledge’ (WHO, 2020b: 9) and subsequently considers the emotional appeal of storytelling in crisis communication (WHO, 2020b: 13). Experience becomes an element in reality that needs to be productively aligned within the dynamic game of biopolitical government. Hence, experience turns into an opportunity, as the efficiency-inducing terrain of the experiential system is appropriated.

Studies in risk perception and communication thus blur the boundaries between rationality and irrationality by pointing to differentiated modalities of experiencing. Underlying this account is however a more basic consideration concerning the reality of perception itself. Ultimately, the question ‘Are public perceptions of risk irrational?’ (Slovic, 1992: 150) is irrelevant as soon as perceptions are understood to be real aspects of reality. Risk perceptions produce ‘numerous realities’ (Slovic, 1992: 150). The problem hence becomes not one of distinguishing between rationality and irrationality but one of integrating a reality that is experienced in its multiplicity into processes of governance (Slovic, 1992: 150). Capturing this multiplicity of risk perceptions eventually promises a ‘richer [and] more complex’ (Slovic, 1992: 150) picture of reality. The risk-perceiving subject is thus problematised in its ‘world making’ (Anderson, 2014: 42) capacity that multiplies reality. Beyond the basic problem of a mismatch between actual and perceived risks, theories in risk perception thus make a more crucial point about reality which becomes an effect of peoples’ diverse perceptions of it.

In investigating processes of experiencing and circularly entangling these processes with underlying biological developments, studies in risk perception thus provide for ‘a “full[ler]” version of life’ (Anderson, 2011: 221) by expanding the biopolitical imaginary of life through experience. The risk-perceiving subject is modelled as being heavily influenced by the ‘“faint whisper of emotion” called affect’ (Slovic and Peters, 2006: 322, emphasis in original) and thus needs to be addressed through this reality-making capacity to experience. In turn, studies in risk perception offer a way to gauge the emergence of a new ontopolitical terrain of biopolitical governance: the lived experience of reality. Instead of a sovereign reduction of the event, experiential biopolitics affirms its multiplicity as it originates in the experiential capacity of the pandemic subject itself.

Conclusion

Munch characterises the experience of anxiety and illness as a rudder to give direction to his art. In a peculiar way, the WHO’s problematisation of pandemic fatigue follows a similar rationale. It uses experience to navigate the pandemic event and hence, to govern. This article has suggested to read this problematisation through a prism of experiential biopolitics which reformulates the classical biopolitical gaze.

This reformulation runs along three vectors: (1) An interest in the immanent limitations of biopolitics that in turn requires a reflexive governmental gaze. This is the basic governmental outlook that allows for the recognition of pandemic fatigue as an excessive experience of governance. (2) An extension of the imaginary of life underlying biopolitics that moves from a reductive concern for biological life to the recognition of the entanglement of biological life and lived experience. This is reflected in the circular linkage between the understanding of pandemic fatigue as an experience of governance and potentially worsening infection dynamics. (3) A concern for reality that understands the attitude towards a phenomenon to be a constitutive component of that phenomenon. This is reflected in the underlying insistence on the relevance of risk perception. Moving forward to the governmental technologies translating this rationality into practice, the article looked at how behavioural insights studies appropriate the sensory capacities of subjects and create a visibility of the entangled imaginary of pandemic life that merges the living and lived experience. Finally, it interrogated the theories of the pandemic subject that the problematisation of pandemic fatigue hinges on, observing the affirmation of the experiential character of the pandemic subject as well as the multiplication of the event through subjective perception as articulated in studies in risk perception.

Overall, the analysis of the experiential biopolitics of pandemic fatigue contributes to the study of IR along two lines. First, it qualifies the ‘biopolitical reconfiguration’ (Elbe, 2021; see also Harman, 2011; Lakoff, 2015) that critical studies of global health have noted by observing how the continuous deepening of the understanding of life in molecular-informational terms is accompanied by an emergent concern for its experiential capacity. By exploring the epistemic means through which the WHO seeks to assess pandemic fatigue, this article has pointed to the increasing relevance of behaviouralist expertise (including more basic considerations of risk perception) at the international level. Building on the promise of facilitating a highly adaptive process of governance, the appeal of these epistemic resources goes beyond the realm of the WHO and the Covid-19 pandemic, for instance, as part of the UN Innovation Network’s Behavioural Science Group (United Nations (UN), 2022b) that leverages behavioural expertise in fields such as climate change and development. Second, the article adds to pluralising problematisations of states of emergency (Adey et al., 2015; Anderson et al., 2020; Grove et al., 2022). The emergence of pandemic fatigue as a problem of governance underlines the inadequacy of a one-sided reading of the state of emergency as a paradigm of governance and instead highlights how the breakdown of a paradigmatic everyday/emergency distinction itself becomes an object of governmental concern.

As an attempt to deal with the ‘revenge of the real’ (Bratton, 2021), not only of the pandemic but also of its underlying Anthropocenic conditions – of which the Covid-19 pandemic is a globally felt instance – experiential biopolitics tries to assess this new ⁵ ‘experience of the real’ (Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero, 2008: 289) and its associated cancellation of the future in light of an ever-extended now. In line with this governmental orientation, it comes as no surprise how notions of ‘crisis fatigue’ (UN, 2022a) in climate communication and ‘climate change anxiety’ (WHO, 2022) emerge as further problematisations on the international stage. Like pandemic fatigue, they gauge the experiential effects of living through an emergency that gradually forfeits the promise of being resolved. As a modest caveat to readings that may feel inclined to invest hope in the excessive forces of experience as a vital source of resistance to apparatuses of governance, this article submits that experience is already being governmentalised and brought to function as part of yet another biopolitical innovation.

Author biography

Nicolas Gäckle is a PhD candidate in History and Theory of International Relations at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. His research interests include the innovations and limits of the biopolitical as well as the experience of time in the Anthropocene and its governance. His work has previously been published in Mobilities.