DISCURSIVITY OF THE GOVERNMENTAL REASON DURING THE COVID-19 PANDEMICS

Abstract

The present work aims to analyze the effects of governmentality in news stories produced during the covid-19 pandemic by Agência Pará de Notícias which belongs to the Government of Pará, Brazil. We rely on the understanding that, in the realm of governmentality, states policies put in motion devices for the safety of the population. As postulated by Foucaultian studies, governmentality and biopolitics, if there are gains in public policies presented as protection and care for the population, there also are losses when the state is overactive in the control and in the production of subjectivities through those policies. The present analyses, therefore, are grounded on Foucaultian studies not to collect the all documents in the archive produced about/during the pandemic, but to circumscribe in the analyses how discourses of governmentality and biopolitics put into motion various fields of knowledge whose network of meanings engages in the production and in the conduction of attitudes, control over bodies, framing of subjects in spaces of circulation and production of truths. From this perspective, we select utterances that circulate in the governmental discourses about the covid-19 pandemic, allowing a glimpse of how the art of governing plays with different strategies that focus not only on the population’s health, but mostly on the regulation of conduct and on the production of subjectivities, acting massively upon bodies normalized by techniques of governmental rationality.

Keywords: Governmental Reason; Conduction of Conduct; Covid-19 Pandemic.