by Pepe Escobar for The Saker Blog (cross posted with the Asia Times)
The plague-stricken town, traversed throughout 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
Predictably eyeing the Decline and Fall of the American Empire, a serious academic debate is raging around the working hypothesis of historian Kyle Harper, according to whom viruses and pandemics – especially the Justinian plague in the 6th century – led to the end of the Roman Empire.
Well, history actually teaches us that epidemics are more like revelatory moments than social transformers.
Patrick Boucheron, a crack historian and a professor at the esteemed College de France, offers a very interesting perspective. Incidentally, before the onset of Covid-19, he was about to start a seminar on the Black Death medieval plague.
Boucheron’s view of Boccaccio’s Decameron, written in 1350 and about young Florentine aristocrats who fled to the Tuscan countryside to tell stories, focuses on the plague’s character as a “horrible beginning” that tears apart social liaisons, provokes a funerary panic and has everyone wallowing in anomie.
Then he draws a historical parallel with Thucydides writing about the Athens plague in the summer of 430 BC. Pushing it to the limit, we may venture that Western literature actually starts with a plague – described in Book 1 of the Iliad by Homer.
Thucydides’ description of the Great Plague – actually typhoid fever – is a literary tour de force as well. In our current setting, that’s more relevant than the “Thucydides trap” controversy – as it’s idle to compare the context in ancient Athens with the current US-China hybrid war.
Both Socrates and Thucydides, incidentally, survived the plague. They were tough, and acquired immunity from their earlier exposure to typhoid. Pericles, the leading citizen of Athens, was not so lucky: he died at 66, a victim of the plague.
The city in fear
Boucheron wrote an immensely interesting book, Conjurer la Peur (To Conjure Fear) telling the story of Siena a few years before the Black Death, in 1338. This is the Siena pictured by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in the walls of the Palazzo Pubblico – one of most spectacular allegorical frescoes in history.
In his book, Boucheron writes about political fear before it is engulfed by biological fear. Nothing could be more contemporary.
In Lorenzetti’s Allegory of Bad Government, the court of bad justice is governed by a devil holding a poisoned chalice (today that would be the “crowned poison” – or coronavirus). The devil’s eyes are crossed and one of his feet is over a goat’s horns. Floating above his head we find Avarice, Pride and Vainglory (match them with contemporary political “leaders”). War, Treason, and Fury sit to his left (the US Deep State?) and Discord, Fraud and Cruelty on his right (casino capitalist financialization?). Justice is bound, and her scales have fallen. Talk about an allegory of the “international community.”
Boucheron pays special attention to the city as depicted by Lorenzetti. That’s the city at war – as opposed to the harmonious city in the Allegory of Good Government. The crucial point is that this is a depopulated city – much like our cities in quarantine now. Only men at arms are circulating and, as Boucheron tells it: “We guess that behind the walls, people are dying.” So this image has not changed today – deserted streets; quite a few elderly people dying in silence in their homes.
Boucheron then makes a startling connection with the frontispiece of Hobbes’s Leviathan, published in 1651: “Here again there is a city depopulated by an epidemic. We know because at the borders of the image we identify two silhouettes with birds’ beaks, which represent the doctors of the plague,” while the people in the city have been sucked upward, ballooning the figure of the Leviathan state monster who is very confident of the fear he inspires.
Boucheron’s conclusion is that the state is always capable of obtaining an absolutely unprecedented resignation and obedience from the population. “What’s complicated is that even if what everything we say about the society of surveillance is scary and true, the state obtains this obedience in the name of its most undisputed function, which is to protect the population from creeping death. That’s what plenty of serious studies define as ‘biolegitimacy’.”
And I would add, today, a biolegitimacy boosted by widespread voluntary servitude.
The Age of Haphophobia
Michel Foucault was arguably the premier modern cartographer of the Panopticon-derived surveillance society.
Then there’s Gilles Deleuze. In 1978, Foucault famously declared that, “perhaps, one day, this century will be called the Deleuzian century.”
Well, Deleuze is actually more 21st century than 20th. He went farther than anyone else studying societies of control – where control does not come from the center or from the top but flows through micro-vigilance, even activating the desire on everyone to be disciplined and monitored: once again, voluntary servitude.
Judith Butler, talking about South Africa-based critical theorist Achille Mbembe’s extraordinary Necropolitics, noted how he “continues where Foucault left off, tracking the lethal afterlife of sovereign power as it subjects whole populations to what Fanon called ‘the zone of non-being’.”
So a great deal of the intellectual debate ahead of us, borrowing from Fanon, Foucault, Deleuze, Mbembe and others, will necessarily have to focus on biopolitics and the widespread state of exception – which, as Giorgio Agamben has demonstrated, referring to Planet Lockdown, is now completely normalized.
We cannot even begin to imagine the consequences of the anthropological rupture caused by Covid-19. Sociologists for their part are already discussing how “social distancing” is an abstraction, defined and lived in quite unequal terms. They are discussing the reasons why the powers that be chose a martial vocabulary (“lockdown”) instead of forms of mobilization guided by a collective project.
And that will lead us to deeper studies of the Age of Haphophobia: our current condition of widespread fear of physical contact. Historians will be trying to analyze it in conjunction with how social phobias have evolved across centuries.
There’s no question that Foucault’s exhaustive mapping should be understood as a historical analysis of different techniques used by the powers that be to manage the life and death of populations. Between the crucial years 1975 and 1976, when he published Discipline and Punish (featured in this essay’s epigraph) and the first volume of History of Sexuality, Foucault, based on the notion of “biopolitics,” described the transition from a “sovereign society” to a “disciplinary society.”
His main conclusion is that techniques of biopolitical government spread out way beyond the legal and punitive spheres, and now are all over the spectrum, even lodged inside our individual bodies.
Covid-19 is presenting us with a huge biopolitical paradox. When the powers that be act like they are protecting us from a dangerous disease, they are imprinting their own immunity-based definition of the community. At the same time they have the power to decide to sacrifice part of the community (elderly people left to die; victims of the economic crisis) to the benefit of their own idea of sovereignty.
The state of exception to which many parts of the world are subjected now represents the normalization of this unbearable paradox.
House arrest
So how would Foucault see Covid-19? He would say that this epidemic radicalizes biopolitical techniques applied to a national territory, and inscribes them in a political anatomy applied to each individual body. That’s how an epidemic extends to the whole population political measures of “immunization” that previously only applied – violently – to those that were considered “aliens,” inside and outside the national, sovereign territory.
It’s irrelevant whether Sars-Covid-2 is organic; a bioweapon; or, CIA conspiracy theory-style, part of a world domination plan. What’s happening in real life is that the virus reproduces, materializes, extends and intensifies – for hundreds of millions of people – dominant forms of biopolitical and necropolitical management that were already in place. The virus is our mirror. We are what the epidemic says we are, and how we decide to face it.
And under such extreme turbulence, as noted by philosopher Paul Preciado, we end up reaching a new necropolitical frontier – especially in the West.
The new territory of the border politics the West has been testing for years over “The Other” – blacks, Muslims, the poor – now starts at home. It’s as if Lesbos, the key entrance island for refugees in the Eastern Mediterranean coming from Turkey, now started at the entrance of each Western apartment.
With pervasive social distancing in place, the new border is each and everyone’s skin. Migrants and refugees were previously considered viruses, and only merited confinement and immobilization. But now these policies apply to whole populations. Detention centers – perpetual waiting rooms that abolish human rights and citizenship – are now detention centers inside one’s own home.
No wonder the liberal West has been plunged into a state of shock and awe.
Historian Kyle Harper is wrong. The Roman Empire (ie. the Western Roman Empire) did not perish due to the Justinian plague in the 6th century. That is contrary to historical facts. He forgets that Rome fell in the year 476, which I believe is the 5th century. After that the East Roman Empire took over, becoming known as Byzantium, and run by Greeks. It’s capital was in Constantinople. Strange that the plague did not destroy the Byzantium Empire. As for ancient Rome, it fell because it was overextended, and because the greed of it’s aristocracy could only be satisfied by permanent wars and plundering. In the end there is nothing left to plunder. Empires require huge amounts of money and create many enemies. When Rome fell in 476, the first to flee was the aristocracy, leaving the city to the Vandals. And the impoverished citizens of Rome ? What did they do ? They opened the gates of the city, seeing the Vandals as liberators and not as enemies. Something similar happened in 1789 in France, when the poor turned against the aristocracy. Napoleon gained their favor by distributing aristocratic lands among the peasantry, who became people of property, and thus pro-Napoleon.
As for the the current corona virus, there are so many contradictory facts about it that at the present moment I am not sure what to think about it. When AIDS appeared in 1980, government scientists pointed their fingers at monkeys, stating they were responsible. However, analysts pointed their fingers at Fort Dietrich, the US bio lab.
When the corona virus appeared last year, government officials and scientists pointed their figures at bats. After that fingers were pointed at the bio lab in Wuhan. At the same time fingers were again pointed at the bio lab in Fort Dietrich. The Chinese responded by pointing their fingers at the US military team which came to Wuhan for the international military olympic’s, as they are unofficially known.
The unfortunate impression is that the corona virus is probably a bio weapon, introduced for a variety of reasons, ie. as an excuse for the coming monetary crash, as an excuse for China to be financially destroyed through compensation demands by Western governments, for both China and Russia to be economically and politically subverted by the virus, as an excuse for highly questionable vaccines to be introduced, and ones that destroy fertility and introduce micro chips into the body for population control, etc.
What I personally find highly suspicious is that the virus appeared at this particular time, when both China and Russia were on the rise economically and politically, and when both established a political and economic alliance. On the other hand the virus did more damage to the West than it did to the East, as both Russia and China handled the epidemic much more efficiently than Western countries. No doubt the future will present us with a much clearer picture.
Rome was no more the capital of the Roman Empire since 330 AD when the ‘Nova Roma’ ἡ Νέα, δευτέρα Ῥώμη, “the New, second Rome” was founded. The ‘Old Rome’ ceased to be the see of the Emperor earlier. Since the reign of Diocletian the Empire was split into ‘West’ and ‘East’ ruled from Nicomedia in the East, and Mediolanum in the West.
The so called ‘fall of Rome’ in 476 (not under the Vandals who plundered the city in 455 after what they retreated in Africa) was in reality the deposition of the Western Emperor Romulus from Ravenna (that was the capital of the Western part) by the Herul warlord Odoacer who sent the imperial insignia to Constantinople, who made him a patrician and made him viceroy of Italy. The barbarian ‘kings’ sported themselves as representatives of the Emperor. The Justinian plague did affect especially Constantinople but indeed hampered the reunification of the Empire that Justinian started so successfully, but it did not have, by far, the catastrophic effect attributed to it.
BF, excellent take on the history. People forget the Huns of Attila, who went through what is modern day Bulgaria, Austria reached Paris and went down to Northern Italy. Northern Italy was also concurrently taken control of by what is generally called Germanic hordes. Who, not a commonly known fact, consisted of no less than 79 different ethnic groups including Minoans and other Greeks (there were 168 Greek cities in modern day Germany), who lived there since about 3000BC. We can add Vandals, Celts, and others. Rome later become Holly Roman Empire controlled by “Germans, Franks, etc.” And yes, Rome overextended itself, after it drained all the juices from everyone around it fell apart. Holly Roman Empire, for the same reason, attacked and plundered Constantinople. Athens shared similar faith centuries before. Interestingly enough, Rome and Kingdom of Makedon never dared to attack Sparta, except for stupid Athens.
«…and because the greed of it’s aristocracy could only be satisfied by permanent wars and plundering»
So, true!
What many people fail to understand is that any State requires a healthy middle class to provide taxes, soldiers, and, in the past, corvée labor. However, the Roman state, unlike the ones in the Mesopotamia and Israel, had not provision for debt forgiveness, and this eventually transferred almost all property from the middle class to an elite class of creditors. As Roman citizens were reduced into a perennial state of debt and servitude, they were no longer able to support the Roman state.
In fact, the “resurrection” of the Roman Empire (aka “Byzantine Empire”) in the 7th century correlated with land reform laws that protected the farmer class from a predatory class of creditors.
Professor Michael Hudson has written an eye-opening book on the subject, “…and forgive them their debts: Lending, Foreclosure and Redemption From Bronze Age Finance to the Jubilee Year” that sums the topic really well.
Insightful and true. But beware the “elderly people left to die” emotional trapdoor, which is a way of herding sheep who haven’t learned to view the sheepdog critically.
The end state of old age is universally death. Many of us would choose to die in our own homes with palliative care if we could. Those who die alone and overlooked from covid-19 would have died the same way from any other cause.
In the west we keep more and more elderly people alive for longer and longer in crippled, undignified half lives; hooked up to oxygen and fed cocktails of drugs, most of which are to counter side effects of other drugs.
We’re so terrified of “letting” them reach the inevitable conclusion of this artificial life-stage that, when a natural event occurs which makes it impossible to prevent it, even with invasive intubation, we chuck the whole of society under a bus in the name of sentiment.
True, CV is also a risk to some otherwise healthy, independent elders. But of course most of them haven’t entered the elder-farming, wealth extraction “care” system, so they don’t count in the calculations.
The essence of Christianity is to believe in Christ conquering death in the name of all believers.
Materialism and very intensive de-Christianization have led to us being afraid of something only mildly more dangerous than common flu (through associating virus with death). And that led to us being incarcerated without a shot fired, without governments having to build prisons, and without them having to feed us.
It’s a really sad state, but we only have ourselves to blame. Some bravery and fearlessness are well overdue.
“only mildly more dangerous than common flu ”
that is not what the bio weapon theorists explain: they claim that Covid-9 is a platform bio weapons that leays the basis for all the recent pandemics in the human body..that over time one is subject to all of them. which implies that Covid is never done..we are infected and will have to deal with the slowing revealing enormous consquences over our entire lives
this suggest that ordinary people and their potential democracy as the way forward for human social organization is done..that the capitalist have won.
and what is worse there is also the implication that the capitalist have the world rigged in such a way as to equalize their small numbers elative to the masses by technological weaponry, particularly of the biological weapon kind.
no wonder they have been and are looting the planet as openly and exhausively as they have been. they appear to be not afraid of popular revolution at all
in fact while they just recenty collapsed the american stock exchange..they apparently collapsed society with Corona..lockdown and social distancing! “what revolution in response generalized minority looting of the planet! people cant even talk to each other..from fear of plague and police.”
to ‘socialize’ now its breaking the law!
but by this argument, and the facts on the ground, Corona-19 does appear to be indeed a massive and most effective and dangerous and long term bio weapon against the ordinary people of the entire planet. I used to wonder how the capitalists planned to save themslves. now we have seen at least one part of their response to the potential or general social revolution: shut down the people..render them unable to protect themslves from all and any control meause imposed by the deep state
“only mildly more dangerous than common flu ” really
that comment appears to make no sense at all from reports now coming out. Covid-19 appears to have been engineered to be the solution to all capitalist dreams of permanent social control. it looks like all apsects of global capitalist political problems were considered and fully answered by Covid-19
Democrit, the ability to live long til ripe old age is not a modern invention. People in ancient Greece easily lived past 80′ or 90′. Just look at all the famous philosophers, except for the people who died in wars. Long life depends on the quality of foods and standard of living. Eating healthy foods is a major determining factor. The problem with modern foods is its “manufacturing” process, which in turn pushes people into the hands of ever so greedy pharma and medical profession.
There doesn’t appear to have been any justification to have shut down the west over this virus. That would indicate there is an alternate reason which is not clear to the average person.
Look what they are doing to us. House arrest is a good description. Restricting the number of people who can talk to each other in the open. Not being within so many feet of another. One new restriction after another is added, like tightening the screws tighter. And while this is happening, certain products disappear from store shelves. Prices start escalating. Few have jobs. First it was toilet paper and other paper products. Now it is flour and yeast. I get the distinct impression I am being trained as a prisoner.
I recall what Russell Means said in an interview quite a few years back: Welcome to the reservation!
Craig, god comment. One of the interesting question is: why shortage of the toilet paper? Followed by the question: what’s next “hair colour”?
Also, just recently I came across an article, which suggested that lack of woodchips, thanks to the lockdowns, is the main reason for the shortage of the toilet paper. Sweden, allegedly threatened by the “World Mafia” hasn’t locked down and is doing very well. Putin has allegedly threatened those who “created the virus” to expect being engulfed in the “nuclear fire”. Interesting if true.
Anonius,
There is substance to your claim that Sweden is doing well, especially when compared to Southern Europe and the US. Sadly, the threat from the Mafia is not an alleged one. Unemployment is sharply on the rise and, with it, the bankruptcies of small businesses as demand takes a hit. I was reminded of this yesterday as I went out to buy a new pair of shoes. When I was leaving the shop after having bought my shoes, the shopkeeper expressed her overwhelming gratitude — I was the only customer showing up during the entire week.
A fairly scary scenario can be devised of this bug.
A 40 tentacle sticky sphere that attaches to a lung to plant its seeds, and once seeded easily breaks away w/39 more tentacles looking to reproduce once again. This type of bug could really cause some havoc among the impatient which we certainly have become as a society.
I am surprised to see Pepe drifting into meaningless and unprofitable scholarly mystification. Usually he cuts through all that nonsense to the basics of our situation, which are very simple and obvious if not hidden beneath intellectual obfuscations. Rich people are destroying life on Earth — that is it plain and simple. It begs the question, how do we stop them?!
Do you know what an allegory is?
The best Pepe Escobar Ever! This analysis takes it beyond what I thought previously, i.e. these indiscriminate mass shut-downs are a technique of class warfare to destroy people’s sense of solidarity. Oh, but as Escobar pointed out it is much, much more as they are “messing with our minds” ultimately.
Although there have been some efforts of the young to organize for better working conditions from Lord of the Flies, Bezos, those have failed with the other young greeting their inevitable firings with blank faced stares. yes, those blank faced scared stares of those who were never allowed to resolve playground disputes with physical contests of power, one on one, but rather through teacher-mediated solutions. This mind set is not good for when you round a corner on a hiking trail and surprise a mountain lion who whirls about: one had better not run; one had better find the inner resolve and ability to project power quickly to make it decide that discretion is the better part of valor, and if that does not work, figure out quickly the best action to best survive the encounter to come. That frozen, blank-faced stare of the American young adult does not bode well for a humane future, I fear. And why shouldn’t they be frightened? Adults tell them they are about to be killed in a mass school shooting, that they have 12 years before something called “global warming” gets us all and now the monster-Virus-thingee stalks the land as all the elders scatter for their burrows and hide.
And so we sit, waiting for the other shoe to drop or is it that boot pressed forever on the face which will be the metaphor of an already sealed future? I do not think so….just as there is a split in the Chinese ruling group and in Russia, there is one in the land of Looneytunes . I suspect the mid ranks of the military form part of its informal network. Perhaps wishful thinking on my part?
I understand that many folks are into shaudenfruede but the humble people are my peeps who have been fed lies, bad food, feckless leadership, superficial religion, feel-good ideas in school, increasingly perverse culture and prescribed addictions by medical professionals etc.. like frogs boiled slowly in an pot over time.
And I most strenuously object. Yes, Alex Jones who opposes the NWO home agenda but supports it abroad is trying to organize resistance. It will not work because his total outlook does not hold logic-he will attract the passionately ignorant in small enough numbers to be easily crushed. Sadly.
“especially the Justinian plague in the 6th century – led to the end of the Roman Empire”
The truth is the Roman Empire did not end until 1453.
History of the Roman Empire was artificially divided by Hieronymus Wolf in 1557 into pre-Christian and Christian period. For the later one he invented term Byzantium and it was not until 19th century that the term came into general use.
This is just another example of the falsified history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_Empire
“The truth is the Roman Empire did not end until 145three.”
Anyone relying on what Wikipedia states can frequently be misled by their fallacies, and the gross lies they produce.
Read some authentic accounts of when the Roman Empire really died, and do not ever use Wikipedia as a “source.”
@Rubicon
I have used Wikipedia as it was handy. If even they had to admit Byzantyum did not exist that should be something.
I have checked a number of other sources to confirm.
Whar are your sources to prove official version is correct?
Show me one document older than 16th century which uses word Byzantine and I will admit I am wrong.