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.
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