Marrying the sources and mechanisms of power? Understanding the quarantine hotel through Michel Foucault and Michael Mann

ABSTRACT

Using the Norwegian quarantine hotel as a case, I analyse the narratives of 46 ‘guests’, so to explore this biopolitical device, which for biopolitical objectives enables a series of disciplinary mechanisms of power. To do this, I marry Michel Foucault’s approach to the mechanisms of power with Michael Mann’s work on the sources of power, fixating my analysis around the link between ‘discipline’, ‘control’ as well as ‘biopolitics’ and ‘infrastructural power’. The paper’s objective is to explore this empirical case so to advance our understanding of how mechanisms of power work, and are made to work, by exploring the infrastructural sources of power underpinning the quarantine hotel as a nexus of power. This theoretical marriage between two giants in the scholarship on power is operationalized in this empirical case to reveal the utility of exploring the link between the microphysics and macrophysics of power, in general and in the context of COVID-19, through combining these approaches.

KEYWORDS:

• Biopolitics
• COVID-19
• discipline
• Foucault
• Infrastructural power; Mann

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lars Erik Løvaas Gjerde

Lars Erik Løvaas Gjerde is a researcher at the European University Institute. He holds a master’s degree in Sociology from the University of Oslo. His research focuses on power, ideology and governmentality, with the politics of COVID-19 being his current topic of interest.