When "Power" Masquerades as "Care"

We have become a singularly confessing society…. [The confession] plays a part in justice, medicine, education, family relationships, and love relations, in the most ordinary affairs of everyday life, and in the most solemn rites: one confesses one's crimes, one's sins, one's thoughts and desires, one's illnesses and troubles; one goes about telling, with the greatest precision, whatever is most difficult to tell…. One confesses—or is forced to confess.

—Michel Foucault (History of Sexuality 59)

1. Introduction

This is an observation made decades before all the changes that information and communication technology have brought about in our social and personal lives lately. With the impositions of the current pandemic scenario added, we have now literally become confessing "netizens." Over the last few years, cheered and driven by the trends in the social media, we have joyously been "confessing," rather vulgarly exposing our social and personal being in the virtual world. And with the onset of the pandemic, in addition to this joyous narcissistic engagement, we have been compelled by the governing and regulatory authorities to "confess" as to not so joyous facts about our lives! Just as Foucault pointed out, our bodies have been brought in concrete terms to the center of surveillance. Our physical presence and interactions are being monitored and our mobility controlled. As "docile bodies," what we have been subjected to by the latent mechanics of "power" has become patent and universal during the pandemic.

Of course, this is not something totally unknown or unprecedented in human history. We have survived similar pandemic situations in the past. But, unlike them, what is interesting about the present case is that, here, human behavioral traits and the customs and practices based on them are working as the most efficient vehicles of transmission! The mode of transmission is very closely bound with the peculiarities of human embodiment, its unique ways of being in and using physical space and the resultant inter-corporeality—which have been definitive of the societal and cultural being of mankind. Given the new world order and the odd political equations characteristic of it, the "political technology of the body" (Foucault, Discipline and Punish 24) that Foucault refers to has become manifest all around.

And ironically, such manipulation of the body in a pandemic scenario is not only being carried out from the outside, but has to be exercised from within by the subject herself, assuming herself as a "cogito" as well as a responsible "global citizen." Thus the "subtle coercion" that Foucault envisages as being exercised on the body, aimed at "obtaining holds upon it at the level of mechanism itself" (Foucault, Discipline and Punish 137), becomes a two-dimensional phenomenon more akin to what Heidegger terms "care"—but in its "inauthentic" manifestation. In the present paper, an attempt will be made at elucidating this curious development.

Any attempt at juxtaposing the Foucauldian conception of "power" and Heidegger's concept of "care" will sound absurd outright. But if one pays close attention to how human reality in its embodied phenomenology is conceived in Heidegger as "care," and how that reality in Foucault, as it reaches out to the world, is being carved and shaped from the outside by "power," there will be nothing absurd about such an attempt. By sensing the ways in which we have all been made "docile bodies" not only from without but also from within, one can immediately see the connection. For this, however, one must understand both of the notions thoroughly. Toward this end, it seems that the Foucauldian notion, being so well discussed in postmodern intellectual circles, doesn't need much of an elaboration here. However, the nuances and subtleties of Heidegger's concept do not seem to have been made so familiar. Especially the rootedness of his celebrated idea of Dasein, in what he terms "authentic care," needs to be brought to light. So we will start by accounting for Dasein as "care." Once this is done, we will explicate the nexus between "power" and "care" as hinted above.

2. Dasein as "Care"

Heidegger's philosophical project consists in formulating a fundamental ontology. While...