Plague Power #2: States of Exception and the Demobilised Zoon Politikon

1.

Total mobilisation was one of the key military concepts bequeathed to us from the war experience of the 20th century. It finds its counterpart today under conditions of pandemic in the notion of total confinement. If, as Ernst Jünger puts it, total mobilisation is the conversion of life into energy at the level of the society, then total confinement must be the withdrawal of energy from that same social life. What is essential to note is that in both instances it is life which is the object of conversion or diminution. But the life targeted here is not the mere biological life of the human animal but the life particular to homo sapiens as the zoon politikon, the political animal of Aristotle's philosophy.

Under conditions of total mobilisation the energy of an entire population is harnessed as projective force to secure its survival in wars, which thanks to the reign of destructive technology, have become equally total. Thus, contrary to the rhetoric of "defending our way of life", which we still hear from politicians today, the life being secured in such cases is not that of the zoon politikon - the qualified form-of-life which the Greeks called bios - but rather it is the bare biological life of the population, which is the life common to all living things. We thus have a paradox of sorts, where the form-of-life that is most particular to humans is being sacrificed, converted by the great war machine of modern states for the sake of saving, or preserving its biological life.

At this level the two concepts, total mobilisation and total confinement, are entirely aligned. In both cases power sacrifices what is most proper to the human in order to conserve (and in the process capture) its biological existence.

This process is a familiar theme in the political writings of Giorgio Agamben, for whom the State of Exception (which total mobilisation and total confinement are extreme iterations) is the moment when the otherwise regulated relationship between power, life and Law is broken, and power (specifically sovereign power) appears in its most arbitrary and potentially murderous form.

We have got used to thinking of power under neoliberalism in that "capillary" model that Foucault described so well in the 1970s; reaching down to the smallest quanta of human activity; monitoring, recording, governing and conducting; and usually coupled - in his account - with a corresponding loss of the sovereign or charismatic mode of governing. As the entropy of government increases, power and authority become diffuse, unlocalisable to a central point. "Central government" then becomes little more than a clearing house. This is the type of elite technocratic governance caricatured by modern populists like Donald Trump, Bolsonaro, Salvini and the rest.

Now, what we're observing under conditions of contagion is the blood being drawn back from the extremities, back into the major arteries of state and police functions. The current pandemic has confirmed much of what we knew or at least suspected was always in the arsenal of modern states in the era of smart phones, big data and the complete interpenetration of civil and security technologies.

2.

In February you'd be forgiven in Europe for watching with a wry smile as the Chinese deployed drones to track individuals suspected of carrying the virus, and even confronting people deemed outside unnecessarily, sometimes following them back to their homes. Only a few short weeks later the tactics we'd like to palm off onto undemocratic states like China appeared in Spain and in the UK, where in Derbyshire the police (in a typically English display of pettiness) used a drone to film people walking their dogs or driving to secluded country spots to take their exercise, neither of which are prohibited under the new "guidelines". 

A similar functional adaptation has been seen with the use of smart phone tracking and card transactions to monitor where infected persons have been and who they may have come into contact with. In Israel and elsewhere all that has been needed to achieve this is the generalising of already existing anti-terror legislation to cover all citizens; an age old slippage that has been repeated throughout modern history where provisions originally designed for criminals get migrated over to the general population. Bertillon cards, the precursor to the modern biometric ID card developed by Alphonse Bertillon in the late 19th century is exemplary in this regard. It should not surprise us that early biometrics were pioneered by the son of a statistician working as a clerk for the Parisian police. Google have now weighed in, helpfully offering to make mobility data from tracking your phone available to help governments "manage the outbreak".

As well as enabling extrapolitical measures likes these, governments around the world have been passing emergency legislation giving them bold new powers over everything from speeding up burials, to closing down schools, shops and business, to detaining those suspected of being infected with the virus. In France where an especially severe lockdown has been implemented, individuals need to fill out a form before they can leave their own homes and present it to any police officer who challenges them. Tens of thousands of fines have already been issued to people deemed to be outside unnecessarily.

Throughout continental Europe only food shopping for essential items is now permitted, though there is no advice on what precisely these essential items are. One might well ask, if only the essentials should be purchased why are supermarkets still selling anything else? In the UK there have been incidents of police searching through shopping bags, with Easter eggs falling foul of the restrictions. In wartime, essential food items were defined and allocated through the rationing system. Inessential items were more or less unavailable. Bananas were one item that vanished from shop shelves entirely during the 1940s.

Without a transparent and properly defined system the police have effectively been given arbitrary powers, and worryingly have had to be reminded that they should be sticking within the guidelines rather than adopting the interpretations of ministers given during press conferences as instructions. At the bottom of that particular slippery slope lies fuhrerprinzip and Nomos Empsychos (living Law).

The Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban is never one to let a crisis go to waste. Last week, as a response to the pandemic his country's parliament voted to give him the power to rule by decree indefinitely. Hungary thus becomes the EUs first bona fide dictatorship; though as yet there is no talk of kicking them out of that accommodating club. Orban's powers arrived with additional legislation outlawing "fake news" about the government's response to the virus. Anyone deemed by the State to be spreading misinformation could be jailed for up to five years. Orban's power grab, as well as punitive measures and emergency powers adopted by governments across the world amplifies an authoritarian trend which was already in process long before the current crisis.

It's important however not to overstate the totalitarian potential at work in these events. Jünger's total mobilisation is more of a regulating ideal than an actually achieved state of affairs, and the same goes for total confinement. In the UK the memory of the riots in the summer of 2011 is still strong, and with police numbers having fallen by 20,000 over the intervening period the capacity for law enforcement in the case of widespread civil disobedience is limited.

Despite briefings to the contrary there is widespread belief that the UK's relatively mild lockdown conditions reflect the Conservative government's continued commitment to a strategy of "herd immunity". Hardly constituting a strategy at all, it is in effect allowing the virus to tear through the country so that enough people contract, survive, and build immunity that in great enough numbers would act like a firebreak against further epidemics. The cost of this strategy would be tens of thousands of preventable deaths, not only from Covid-19 but from other medical conditions that an overwhelmed health service could not properly treat. Formally such planed negligence would be the opposite of an authoritarian response, but it is no less destructive, no less biopolitical in its cold economic calculation of mass death and suffering.

There is undoubtedly a danger in all this is that once the pandemic passes we will be faced with years of struggle to roll back the sweeping powers assumed by the State, which will likely be redeployed to serve other purposes and other "emergencies", depending on their perceived utility. Fears over the disappearance of cash, the further erosion of privacy, and the integration of big data across government and corporate institutions are all valid concerns under circumstances where oversight is limited and the normal rules don't apply.

3.

The last few weeks have seen states take actions that we had been led to believe were impossible; massive injections into the economy for the sake of safeguarding workers, the debt of the NHS written off, railway and airline companies renationalised, hospitals constructed in days. All these things that in the UK were propagandised against by the Conservative party during the general election of December 2019. Thinking back to Thomas Hobbes, it’s as if the miraculous power which Western politics has for centuries thought it had cast out from the concept of sovereignty has returned, with the Leviathan revealing itself once more as “that mortal God” to which we owe, under the immortal God, our peace and defence.

There is an intense need for awareness and scrutiny of the decisions being taken in the present circumstances, and to resist the urge - in a situation of understandable fear and uncertainty - of collapsing all social and political life into the management of the (biological) life of the people. Dark undertones have already been glimpsed, such as 'do not resuscitate' (DNR) forms being sent out to disabled people by some GPs in the UK as part of the Coronavirus response. Battlefield triage is the paradigm being reached for to describe the extremely tough decisions having to be made by doctors allocating scarce resources to so many critically ill people. It is one of the very few scenarios where a strict application of the utilitarian principle of maximising quality of life outcomes for the greatest number of people is the most appropriate ethical response. However, generalised to public policy and welfare it very quickly turns into eugenics. 

Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, who has done more than anyone in warning of the dangers of a generalised state of exception, has been accused of downplaying the significance of the Coronavirus pandemic and the need for drastic action in a piece for Quodlibet. 

The piece, written at the end of February, does indeed seem naive in its assessment of the impact of the outbreak and the Italian government's measures which he describes as "frenetic, irrational and entirely unfounded".  However in a clarification issued shortly afterwards the properly ethical philosophical core of his position is clearer:  

"The first thing that the wave of panic that has paralyzed the country obviously shows is that our society no longer believes in anything but bare life. ... Bare life - and the danger of losing it - is not something that unites people, but blinds and separates them. ... People have been so habituated to live in conditions of perennial crisis and perennial emergency that they don’t seem to notice that their life has been reduced to a purely biological condition, as has not only every social and political dimension, but also human and affective. A society that lives in a perennial state of emergency cannot be a free society. We in fact live in a society that has sacrificed freedom to so-called “reasons of security” and has therefore condemned itself to live in a perennial state of fear and insecurity".

The point to make here is that this is not a moral condemnation of the emergency measures taken by governments; it would be foolish to suggest that the "virtue" of the governing class should somehow form a bulwark against the despotism of technicity, or that there was some other obvious response to the pandemic that should have been adopted. What we are seeing now has always been there as a capacity and a real possibility. As Agamben has repeatedly argued - following the insight of Walter Benjamin - the state of exception in which we now live has become the rule. The Coronavirus pandemic functions like a moment of concentration in which political, governmental, and also ethical and social forms are revealed to be shot through with an already existing weight of fear and anxiety. We were already afraid, and were already habituated to sacrificing our freedom to health and security, to the empty city depicted on the frontispiece to Hobbes' Leviathan. What is happening now - while far from an authoritarian takeover - is an acceleration of a process that has been underway for decades.

The Dance of Death - 16th Century German, annonymous artist

Finally, it is worth bearing in mind that there is another side to the "dream" of plague uncovered by Foucault's researches, one pregnant with images of individuals throwing off their masks (metaphorically but may as well be literally) and abandoning their social status to the great debauchery of those who know they are going to die. "Plague overcomes the law just as it overcomes the body". An overcoming of Law and the contiguity between a state of exception and a state of festive anomie is similarly evoked in Agamben's extensive writings. If there is a deeper meaning to the pandemic, one that might point the way towards a different kind of world and a different kind of life in the aftermath, then it may be found here.

Plague Power #1: Soldiers and Plague Doctors in the Political Imaginary of the State

1.

 The plague town is a zone of indistinction, a place where boundaries are set-up and undermined. The logic of contagion challenges divisions between individuals, dissolving separateness into a mass of intermingling and potentially contaminated bodies; while at the same time lockdown suspends life and "social distancing" turns every stranger one encounters into a possible killer.

As I write, nearly one half of the world's population is under a lockdown of one sort or another. It's striking reading over the methods by which plague was controlled in centuries past to see that so little has changed. Stop the spread, control the disorderly flow of bodies and the invisible evil passing between them. Separate, isolate, create distance, but also totalise by way of an analysis that takes in the whole population and characterises it down to the finest grain; infection rates broken down into boroughs and wards, death rates, age and "underlying conditions". 

On that latter point, never has hearing of a deceased person's underlying conditions (which we should remember can include everything from high blood pressure to terminal cancer) given so much relief to so many of the living. Everyone is now getting a crash course in epidemiology and virology; modern perspectives on contagion which produce demands quite different from the theory of miasmas. Few people are desperately perfuming their homes in an attempt to avoid infection, but in the stretched queues outside supermarkets the red raw marks of excessive hand washing are plainly visible.

Although the pandemic is being given the window dressing of a state of war the analogy is in fact quite insufficient. "Send Coronavirus packing!" was Boris Johnson's half hearted attempt to conjure a Churchillian moment from out of his bag of bluster and incoherence, just before he contracted the disease himself. He had little hope of success as the paradigm of plague doesn't lend itself well to the kind of jingoism and will-to-heroics that military conflicts do. In the first instance the "enemy" has no face and so cannot be propagandised against. So much of the get-up-and-go which characterises mobilisation for war is made off the back of leveraged prejudices; "send the Krauts packing!" 

This hasn't, however, stopped Donald Trump from calling it the "Chinese virus"; an act inspired by racialised economic warfare, repeated by many of his officials and which has done nothing but contribute to a rise in attacks on Asian looking people in the US. Infantry and air power are futile against a microscopic army, but he'll send the troops and fire off the Tweets anyway. The image Trump was hoping to evoke (it is the only one he knows)  is that of an external threat; the barbarian at the gates, and the necessity to mobilise to defend the homeland.

All this is useless when the threat is within the body of the people itself, an internal contagion for which an analogy with rebellion or civil war is more apt. As in the case of insurrection and "risings", a strict disciplinary regime is imposed in order to divide the sick from the well, the loyal from the seditious, isolate the infection and characterise the nature of its spread. By what means does it move across the land? through what disorderly conduct? We are by now familiar with the biopolitical implications of all this; the hot-house of modern disciplinary power that is implicit in the politically operationalised concept of population, and the management of its health. 

Only with the rise of statistics and the developing sciences of microbiology and pathology did it become possible to visualise the biological life of a population and make of it an object of political rationality. But even before the advent of those sciences, the plague and its management was an event where the bare-life of a whole community was made palpable and open to capture. Now, in this unprecedented moment the same rupture appears on a world scale. The coronavirus pandemic marks the appearance of bare-life elevated under the rubric of a generalised state of emergency to the life of the entire global population.

2.

"The plague-stricken town, traversed through-out with hierarchy, surveillance, observation, writing; the town immobilized by the functioning of an extensive power that bears in a distinct way over all individual bodies - this is the utopia of the perfectly governed city". Michel Foucault - Discipline and Punish

No image speaks to the authentic core of State power more than the famous frontispiece to Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan. The engraving shows the crowned figure of Leviathan towering over a land speckled with churches and villages. Its torso and limbs are composed of the people (or dissolved multitude as Hobbes puts it) who are turned towards the face of the giant figure, each having agreed to enter a covenant to give up their Right to the sovereign in exchange for peace and security within the body of the State. This is the well known contractual side to Hobbes political ontology. The frontispiece also contains many mysteries and much symbolism that has contributed to its notoriety.

The depiction of the city in the foreground is of special interest to us. Several scholars have noted how the city appears devoid of inhabitants, including the figure of the sovereign itself which seems to hover beyond the horizon of the territory over which it reigns. One explanation for this paradox offered by Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben is that it reflects the non-political status of the people in Hobbes' philosophy. As a "dissolved" multitude within the body of the State the people do not have autonomy apart from their representation by the sovereign. They cannot take back the agreement they have made, nor limit the extent of the power they have engendered. Conversely, prior to them giving up their Right to the sovereign the people are a "disunited" multitude within the state of nature, a pre-political state according to Hobbes. So although the multitude - which made the original covenant - continues to exist dissolved in the body of Leviathan, the people (as that collective will) no longer has any independence apart from the State. The people appear only in the moment the sovereign State is constituted before vanishing again. It is for this reason the city appears to be empty. Empty that is apart from two sets of figures, soldiers and what some scholars have identified as plague doctors.

The presence of soldiers, who in the image patrol outside a fort, neatly ties in with the symmetry of the frontispiece, the left side of which is given over to symbols representing the temporal power, the most visceral of which being the sword of justice held in the right hand of the giant figure. The plague doctors can be seen outside the cathedral on the opposite side, which  predominantly features symbols of the spiritual or ecclesiastical power. The significance of the inclusion of plague doctors is not immediately obvious, and the interpretation is admittedly a little incongruous with the overall symmetry of the symbolic scheme (could they not be wearing ecclesiastical vestments; the elongated "nose" rather meant to depict a hood?). It becomes more plausible when we consider the political significance of plague more generally.

3.

Agamben in his interpretation is I think drawing on Michel Foucault's description of the management of the plague town as a step towards modern forms of surveillance and rationalised systems of power based on division of labour and authority. The term Foucault identifies from the archives is quadrillage a word without direct translation into English but which has connotations of ordering, division and management of a territory. As he writes in Abnormal (1975): "from the sentries who kept watch over the doors of the houses from the end of the street, up to those responsible for the quarters, those responsible for the districts and those responsible for the town, there is a kind of pyramid of uninterrupted power. It was a power that was continuous not only in this pyramidal, hierarchical structure, but also in its exercise, since surveillance had to be exercised uninterruptedly".

This disciplinary mode of power over a population (which he would later go on to call biopolitics), based on inclusion, ordering and observation was opposed in Foucault's account  to the treatment of lepers, who were excluded from the community, almost as an act of purification, and who were stigmatised rather than monitored and categorised. Indeed he even goes so far as to suggest that the management of plague and of lepers represent the only two major models for the control of individuals in the West. We can perhaps distil this claim to its most basic characteristic, that each model is based on either inclusion or exclusion of individuals. Even so, this opposition is perhaps a little too black and white, especially in the light of modern state run health and welfare systems which are often the site of exclusions, albeit by way of nationwide bureaucratic decision making.

Following Agamben's logic we might evoke the liminal or threshold concept of the inclusion/exclusion dyad, which would help us understand how a form of organisation that takes in every individual through observing, recording and monitoring, is also capable of asserting a right over life and death in a manner we associate with the Medieval sovereign. That is after all what large scale healthcare systems and governments are now in the process of doing, deciding where resources are allocated, who gets tested and who is left to die alone without treatment. It is for this reason that I think Agamben likes to pair the soldiers in Hobbes' frontispiece with plague doctors. 

The plague doctor symbolises the extreme moment (like a state of war) when the bare-life of the population appears most clearly as an object of political decision making. This is when the power over life and death that we associate with pre-modern rulers appears clearly as an ever present part of our nominally modern and rational systems of government. Foucault describes this as the political "dream" of the plague, "in which the plague is the marvellous moment when political power is exercised to the full". It is a dream inextricably linked to the dream of a military society.

According to this reading Hobbes' frontispiece suggests a powerful and dark vision of political life. The ultimate expression of sovereign power is a city entirely given over to the management of health and security. It is this paradigm we are now undoubtedly seeing unfolding across the globe. We are living through a time where the power of the State looms large over an empty city, and where the only people permitted to walk the streets are security personnel and health workers.