Saturday, 4 April 2020

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.

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