The Racial Spectacular: Pandemic Governance Through Dashboards and State Biosecurity

Abstract

Data visualizations related to COVID-19 operate as forms of spectacle essential to the racialized governance of the pandemic. Guy Debord theorized spectacle as separation—between subjects, populations, regions, dots on a map. We extend and revise Debord's framework of spectacle, drawing on Ruth Wilson Gilmore's definition of racism and Sylvia Wynter's critique of monohumanism to position spectacle as ways of seeing as separation: constructed ways of seeing that divide and partition. In this sense, spectacle contributes to material geographies of race and racism: what W.E.B. Du Bois referred to as the global color line and Michel Foucault called the caesura of race. We deploy this anti-racist interpretative methodology to analyze research from the 2020–21 period of the COVID-19 pandemic: first, COVID-19 dashboards that map infections, death, and other pandemic data; and, second, state biosecurity measures of lockdown in so-called areas of concern during the Delta outbreak in Sydney, Australia. Our methodology positions all real-time pandemic monitoring as part of the recursive operation of administering race as problem space, where the biopolitical twinning of life-and-death-making meet. We conclude by asking: what alternative forms of accounting of or for race are possible?