The pandemic is real in biological and health terms. It is also an ideological and media phenomenon. No space in public opinion, debates, or conversations is virus-free. Hypochondria and obsessive cleaning are also undeclared pandemics. Social media these days is flooded with specialists in hand washing, new rules of greeting etiquette, and facemasks design. The middle and upper classes romanticize quarantine. Remote work is the latest trend, while humble people who live hand to mouth are invisible or perceived as unruly and unconscious beings, deserving of exemplary discipline.
At this point nobody can discuss the dimensions of the pandemic: at the time of writing these lines, there are more 116 thousand deaths and 1.8 million confirmed cases. A situation that puts on the table the importance of the public health system throughout the world. Neither will I address the debate on its origins, nor the tensions within some governments more concerned with the progress of the economy than the health and life of their fellow citizens (they decide who lives and who dies). Along these lines, I want to share some initial concerns about the underlying and at the same time transversal security logic of the attempts to contain COVID-19. I am referring to how the pandemic can be politically instrumentalized.
The plague’s medical and political narrative is also about discipline
In mid-January, we discussed Foucault’s panopticism (1975) in my criminology class, just as we do every year. On this occasion, one of my students told me the following week that every time he watches the news about the coronavirus, he cannot help relating it to the metaphor used by the French philosopher: the transfer of the architectural model of the panopticon to a society permeated by disciplinary mechanisms, explained by the measures to control the plague.
