Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The future of politics after the pandemic

COVID-19 exposed the pre-existing conditions of the current global crisis. Many Western states failed to protect their populations, while others were able to suppress the virus only with sweeping social restrictions. In contrast, many Asian countries were able to make much more precise interventions. Everywhere, lockdown transformed everyday life, introducing an epidemiological view of society based on sensing, modeling, and filtering. What lessons are to be learned?

The Revenge of the Real envisions a new positive biopolitics that recognizes that governance is literally a matter of life and death. We are grappling with multiple interconnected dilemmas--climate change, pandemics, the tensions between the individual and society--all of which have to be addressed on a planetary scale. Even when separated, we are still enmeshed. Can the world govern itself differently? What models and philosophies are needed? Bratton argues that instead of thinking of biotechnologies as something imposed on society, we must see them as essential to a politics of infrastructure, knowledge, and direct intervention. In this way, we can build a society based on a new rationality of inclusion, care, and prevention.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Acknowledgments (p. vii)
• Preface: When Death Governs Life (p. 1)
• 1 The Revenge of the Real (p. 7)
• 2 The Big Filtering (p. 15)
• 3 Comparative Governance (p. 21)
• 4 The Epidemiological View of Society (p. 33)
• 5 The Sensing Layer (p. 41)
• 6 Model Simulations (p. 47)
• 7 Surveillance Is Not the Right Word (p. 51)
• 8 What 5G Stands For (p. 60)
• 9 The Problem Is Individuation Itself (p. 66)
• 10 Touchlessness (p. 71)
• 11 Quarantine Urbanism (p. 77)
• 12 Strategic Essentialism (p. 82)
• 13 Resilience and Automation (p. 87)
• 14 The Mask Wars (p. 93)
• 15 The Ethics of Being an Object (p. 103)
• 16 Agamben, Having Been Lost (p. 109)
• 17 The Emptiness of Biopolitical Critique (p. 120)
• 18 The Social Explosion (p. 130)
• 19 For Planetary Competency (p. 143)
• 20 What Is the Post-pandemic? (p. 153)
• Afterword: The Revenge against the Real (p. 167)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

In this dense yet potent account, Bratton (The New Normal), director of the Center for Design and Geopolitics at the University of California, San Diego, draws on lessons learned during the Covid-19 pandemic to "imagine a world in which planetary society is able to deliberately compose itself with compassion and reason" in order to tackle geopolitical problems. He blames Western countries' chaotic, ineffectual response to the disease on a lack of international cooperation and "reactionary forms of political populism" in such nations as the U.S. and the U.K., where an overemphasis on individualism, combined with anti-Chinese attitudes and paranoia about surveillance technology, hindered the efficacy of available solutions such as mask-wearing and temporary lockdowns. In contrast, fatalities were relatively low in Singapore, Taiwan, and other Asian countries where contact tracing and testing were more competently managed and publicly accepted. Arguing that the pandemic has revealed the need for a "planetary positive biopolitics" that prioritizes the shared needs of humankind over geographic boundaries and cultural differences, Bratton outlines how such an approach could harness technological advances and the powers of the state and private corporations to combat climate change and other existential threats. While Bratton offers more utopian ideology than concrete, practical solutions, his call for a global shift in priorities is galvanizing. Philosophically minded activists will want to take note. (June)