“Coronavirus is a real test for population state”

nirmal
9 min readApr 8, 2020

Speed of a bullet train, that’s how the novel coronavirus is reported of being spread across the world. Recent studies claim the infected sneeze can travel up to eight meters, and it can even survive on air. The coughs and spits pass the pathogens to fomites, practically every object under the sun, where it can still be potent for hours, if not days. The control of the speed of this intractable parasite has become the urgencies of cities, communities and countries. However, deceleration of this nanoscopic virus by the human authorities is still a metaphor of dog-chasing-cars. Throughout Asia, Europe and Americas, it’s been a massive killing spree — infections and deaths counting in thousands each day.

Maglev

It was first an outbreak of pneumonia in Hubei province of China, in December, where handful of people consulted the doctors with flu symptoms. Explicitly nonplussed, the authorities rejected the idea that the handful was a presage of the global health disaster. In no time, the virus spread in a way that it overwhelmed hospitals and fatigued doctors. Brash authorities glared at the Huanan wet market, where the virus allegedly originated from animals like bats or pangolins, and locked it. Around the clicks of bats and slithers of pangolins formed a body of discourse of the bioethicists and of the conservationists who called for shuttering of such markets, and shunned the cull of wild animals. These animals became symbolisms of filthy food habits of the Asians, who are already denigrated of gorging themselves on delicacies of cats and dogs.

As infections and deaths quickly soared, the government imposed an emergency, stringent and dictatorial lockdown in further provocation to the liberal orthodoxy which was yet to make a choice between discourse and action. The deaths and infections were still to be personalized in the west as Albert Camus says in The Plague about “a hundred million corpses broadcast through history are no more than a puff of smoke in imagination”. It was far from imagination of the west, the seriousness of the blight.

This truculent demeanor of China against the virus was in no way utterly novel as bellicose phraseologies — “fighting the flu”, “combat the pandemic influenza” and “contain the source” — are in the common parlance of the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for a very long time. In fact, there is cornucopia of scholastic articles on the possible usages of The Art of War of Sun Tzu and On War of Carl von Clausewitz in public health hazards. According to one article, the tactical dispositions outlined by The Art of War are supposed to technically array to quarantine the “center of gravity” and untoward surveillance measures to contain the virus. The televised spectacle in Hubei province was soldierly — communist cadres pointing infrared thermal guns, driving ambulance briskly, and the phalanxes positioned at every corners. Even after assuaging the epidemic, one Chinese authority was still showing a great vengeance to the virus warning those hiding cases “will be nailed on the pillars of shame for eternity”.

Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.

In such a spectacularly convoluted situation, the classic debate of collective rationality and individual freedom, and security and freedom resurges. The Chinese lockdown, the Singaporeans hiring spies, and the Koreans testing everyone whoever comes through are themselves the breach of human rights and the individual privacies. Recently, an obstinate American journalist compared Donald Trump’s lockdown to a program of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party. “I want to go to my hair dresser’s”, he says in a video, “I would rather die of coronavirus than see my right to move outdoors breached.” In the same way, local Italian mayors were seen warning the running enthusiasts who didn’t want to break their habits even at the face of thousands dying.

Thermal gun

After China and South Korea, the virus is bearing a chilling ferocity in Europe and Americas where there is classic shortage of human resources and medical tools appurtenant to combat the pandemic. Ethical dilemma of triage is tiring the hospital staffs. One century has already passed since the 1918 Spanish influenza, but its legacy of incompetency and complacency has remained intact. In Europe and America, 1918 was a weird year with influenza conflagrating and the ruinous Great War settling. As American families were largely superstitious and the pharmaceutical armories bereft of efficacious weaponries, they captured and placed live deer in bedroom, and wore garlic garlands to ward off the pathogens. Authorities prescribed Lifebuoy soaps, antimalarial quinines, tobacco and alcohol as preventative and curative materials. In California, Nobel Prize winning author John Steinbeck was operated in his parents’ bedroom — the doctors drained his purulent lungs through a scalpel pierced through his ribs — the limit experience he summed up: “I went down and down, until the wingtips of angels brushed my eyes.”

The first mass produced carbolic soap

It is a fact in the human history that the laymen have actually grasped the virus — through its spherical and spiked imageries. This zombie particle, which is dead as much as it is living, is being personified as terrorist or a conman who can ambush anyone anywhere. And, it is the first time the laymen are blatantly facing the brunt of simplistic, mechanical and reductionist approach of biomedicine. Is it not eccentric of a person washing hands by rubbing with soap for twenty seconds, and more than ten times a day? Medical personals, across the world, are recommending ambiguous prescriptions and cure. It is an anecdote that Chinese authorities had prescribed hot water with lemons. As the American doctors remain largely unconvinced, President Donald Trump is swayed by the reports that Chinese were prescribing anti-malarial drugs. Depending on its “supply” in the market, professionals are prescribing the general public whether the masks can check the coronavirus. Depending on which aisle of the power structure one is sitting, the doctors are gauging the sincerity of scourge. There is surfeit of specious materials even the doctors and public health specialists are circulating as “scientific” — the one about the weather and climatic conditions is reminicient of Americans who underreported their domestic cases and blamed the “dry, windy spring” of Spain for spreading the contagion in 1918. It is a time when the laymen face fake news and buys bogus treatments. It took a fortnight for a chemistry undergraduate like me to know that the sanitizer I had bought from a locally famous chemist store was an ersatz.

Like a football with spikes. Pic: BBC

Provided its highest population of swine and poultry population, it’s been a long and ethnocentric tradition of the virologists to consider Asia as a reservoir of the viruses. In 1918, many blamed Spain — the victim — for originating the flu until the savants went on to claim that they had conclusively located the American Midwest as the originator, and turned this piece of information as an epidemiological orthodoxy. Is it so? Nobody knows. China was spared as an origin by the own “fallacious” reasoning that the place with lower fatalities couldn’t spread the virus in the first place.

The recent “China” or “Wuhan” viruses are not necessarily and characteristically of the idiolects of Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo, these are the relics of the archaic religious explanation of diseases as sins which have to be externalized and projected towards the other caste, class, religion, race, culture and language, which the American anthropologist Paul Farmer calls “the geography of blame”, and writer Susan Sontag in AIDS and its Metaphors says “every concept of wrong has something to do with others, not us”. Europeans had persecuted hundreds of Jews for “spreading” the plague. French and English quarreled for decades for a question of “dirty” syphilis origin. In America, syphilis was a black disease as much as tuberculosis was a working white man’s ailment.

The blame to the victim/ Reporting in Belfast during Spanish flu Pic: BBC

The sociological concept of “ideal man” the scientific community accepts and feels suspicious of any deviation in physicality and mentality from the anatomy of that ideal man as a mark of “diseased”, “debilitated” and “debauched”. The politics of mind, body and medicine is a collaborated effort. Who is that ideal man of whom Nepal government thought of when it imposed a lockdown for three straight weeks? Gender is obvious, but which religion, ethnicity, caste, class and geography does he belong to? Has he hoarded enough victuals? Does he have access to internet, enough books to read, poems to write, thrillers to watch, and gardens to tend? Does he keeps shut behind the doors, and becomes safe from the coronavirus? Ideal man is everyone one aspires to become except a precariat.

Precariat: the exploited, underemployed and temp workers of the world.

What is pandemic to the ideal man is parergon to the precariat whose problems are abstract, the others’ situation, and opaque to the ruling elites. What is going to happen to a lady who sells vegetables on the sidewalk, to the poor, migrant workers who desperately want to come to their villages, and to the civil society members, interpellated by their ideal man ideologies, urge the government to deploy army to thrash them? Who is going to be beaten, who is going to be reprimanded, and who is going to be politely requested for breaching the lockdown?

Chary of complete chaos, governments of the world are taking the measures they once chastised. According to literary critic, Fredric Jameson, countries as big as China and America, and their people generally don’t have to contextualize themselves vis-à-vis others in their everyday lives. It is in our deep, ontological insecurities that we learn from them our programs and our talking points; we obsequiously accept and vehemently reject their ideologies, programs and policies. Doesn’t the mass exodus in India represent the uncouth imitation of the global measures?

More holocausts in population regime.

By the way of summary, who is going to be blamed for this fiasco? There is no answer, but it is a real test for the population state. Any Foucauldian walking down the street knows that there are more holocausts, genocides and massacres in the recent history because the modern power has been brazenly “exercised on the level of species, the race and the large-scale phenomena of population”. This is the same reason why death sentence and capital punishment directed to an individual is fervently rejected while the “larger numbers of people keep on being slaughtered mercilessly in wars and genocides”. It is through polizeiwissenschaft and wohlfahrt the mediziniche polizei ascended in the west, mathematizing the population through census, ordering mass surveillances and permanent control. This coronavirus is a real test for that extractive, overadministered and panoptic population regime if it can solve the crisis, and lets us survive in a same way it has taken our lives and freedoms in the past. In the end, the parergon of the precariat will become the epistemological space from which this pandemic will be assessed.

Materials

Niall Johnson. Britain and the 1918–19 Influenza Pandemic, a Dark Epilogue. 2006. Routledge.

J. Eric Dietz & David R. Black. Pandemic Planning. 2012. CRS Press.

Michel Foucault. Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. 1994. Penguin Books.

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