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.
No comments:
Post a Comment