pp. 928·29. decembar 2023.· Issue No. 1
Foucauldian governmentality and technologies of the self in post-pandemic biopolitics: biopolitical residue and the legacy of self-tracking in the 2020–2023 interval
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Cheryl McDougallORCID 0000-0002-7650-1114
DOI: https://doi.org/10.65932/critical-reflections-2023-1-1Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0 CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
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Foucauldian governmentality and technologies of the self in post-pandemic biopolitics: biopolitical residue and the legacy of self-tracking in the 2020–2023 interval
The article examines what remains, in habits of self-monitoring and everyday relations to the quantified body, of the emergency biopolitical regime deployed during the first pandemic phase (March 2020 – mid-2022). Drawing on Foucault's concepts of governmentality and technologies of the self, and engaging with recent literature on the quantified self, pandemic biopolitics, and contact-tracing technology, the article develops the concept of biopolitical residue — a sociological-philosophical category for what persists in everyday self-relation once an emergency-biopolitical regime is formally rescinded. The original contribution is a typology of five recurrent forms in which the 2020–2022 emergency rationality continues to operate after its formal end: (1) habituated self-tracking, where bodymonitoring practices acquired during lockdowns persist as an internalised regime of attention to bodily parameters; (2) normalised infrastructural surveillance, where digital architectures built for contact tracing remain available for further public-health or commercial use; (3) accepted biometric border-control logics, where QR-code health-pass systems normalised checkpoint architectures that now extend into travel, events, and workplace access; (4) quantified accountability of health, where individual responsibility is reframed as a duty to provide measurable data; and (5) internalised risk-calculation as personal moral comportment, where the calculative habits of the pandemic have shaped a habitus of permanent self-risk-assessment. The article argues that biopolitical residue occupies the structural position of a technology of the self quietly de-coupled from its emergency justification while retaining its operational logic, and that the contemporary self-tracker is an inheritor of pandemic governmentality whose self-relation is more thoroughly biopolitical than customarily recognised.

The article examines what remains, in habits of self-monitoring and everyday relations to the quantified body, of the emergency biopolitical regime deployed during the first pandemic phase (March 2020 – mid-2022). Drawing on Foucault's concepts of governmentality and technologies of the self, and engaging with recent literature on the quantified self, pandemic biopolitics, and contact-tracing technology, the article develops the concept of biopolitical residue — a sociological-philosophical category for what persists in everyday self-relation once an emergency-biopolitical regime is formally rescinded. The original contribution is a typology of five recurrent forms in which the 2020–2022 emergency rationality continues to operate after its formal end: (1) habituated self-tracking, where bodymonitoring practices acquired during lockdowns persist as an internalised regime of attention to bodily parameters; (2) normalised infrastructural surveillance, where digital architectures built for contact tracing remain available for further public-health or commercial use; (3) accepted biometric border-control logics, where QR-code health-pass systems normalised checkpoint architectures that now extend into travel, events, and workplace access; (4) quantified accountability of health, where individual responsibility is reframed as a duty to provide measurable data; and (5) internalised risk-calculation as personal moral comportment, where the calculative habits of the pandemic have shaped a habitus of permanent self-risk-assessment. The article argues that biopolitical residue occupies the structural position of a technology of the self quietly de-coupled from its emergency justification while retaining its operational logic, and that the contemporary self-tracker is an inheritor of pandemic governmentality whose self-relation is more thoroughly biopolitical than customarily recognised.