Photo of the Italian city Forlì made by Laura Bernardelli in spring 2020.

I saw the life of an Italian city come to a halt.

In a warm February evening all the televisions started to talk in one voice. On the next morning the university was locked. I decided to go for a walk in the park, the spring had come unseasonably early, but the park was deserted. In the next days, the noise of the traffic died down. The people got together in front of the supermarkets only to disperse as soon as they passed in a solemn procession through the glowing spectacle of the goods. The ambulance sirens started to explode more and more often.

The life of a city is woven from everyday lives. Halting it requires an extraordinary power because everyday life is a resultant of countless molecular forces. My walk in the park for example was shaped by the desire to steal some time for myself, the conflicting desire not to waste time, the fantasy that I am being myself when I am alone, the surplus enjoyment of the spring sun and the children's games. Those desires, counter desires, fantasies, enjoyments had been molded by the pressure of social forces like the merciless rhythm of the expiring deadlines, the city planning which situated the park next to the university at the periphery of the city, the concept of individual which could be traced back at least to the dawn of liberalism, the tacit calculation that since the heart of the city was in the opposite direction, it was unlikely to run into colleagues. As even such a microscopic illustration shows, everyday life has a geology that cannot be transformed by urgent interventions because it has been formed for centuries. The landscape of an everyday life is shaped by desires, anxieties, calculations, fantasies that are too small, random, short-lived to be settled into an order. Because of this, no power can establish control over everyday life, just like no power can subjugate love or truth.

I am teaching biopolitics. I am explaining to the students that the state is powerless without the small mechanisms of control that can be embedded in hospitals, factories, streets, homes.^[1] Occasionally, I am illustrating their operation with the Moscow 1770–1772 epidemic.^[2] Initially, it was believed that the contagion had been brought to the city by Turkish merchants or by the soldiers returning from the battlefields of the last Russo-Turkish war. Thus the authorities closed the city, they turned it into a cell. Then the city was fragmented into smaller cells – neighborhoods, streets, homes. The streets started to function as a surveillance grid producing flows of numbers: the number of the people locked in their homes, the number of deceased, the number of the recalcitrant. Yet although this disciplinary mechanism had been used for centuries, it turned out to be inefficient, perhaps because the city was much bigger than the medieval Genoa or Vincennes. The wealthy managed to leave. The merchants took their goods elsewhere. The food was scarce. The surveillance consumed too much human power. The undertakers wearing burlap hoods with holes in place of eyes did not manage for days to collect the corpses, which had been thrown out of the windows. Moreover, since the undertakers were poor, instead of burning the belongings of the deceased, they took home everything valuable. The streets were flooded by crowds seeking salvation through miracles or death. Fearing a further outbreak of the disease, the Moscow archbishop forbade the prayers to the miraculous icon of the Mother of God in which the people believed more than in medicine. The crowds killed the archbishop, stormed his monastery and started to attack the wealthy homes seeking food or justice. Then came a mightier army. The riot was crushed. In order to compensate for the inefficiency of the quarantine, the authorities put into operation a new power mechanism. Instead of simply counting the bodies, they started to calculate the morbidity, the mortality, the frequency of the misdemeanors. Soon the authorities found out that the values were not equally distributed over the territory of the city, that the risks of disease, death, riot were concentrated in the poor neighborhoods. Hence it was assumed that the level of risk depended on other variables like destitution, density of population, sanitary conditions, air circulation. In order to alleviate poverty, the authorities started to provide the poor with food. In the coming years, they cleared the slums, built a sewer system for the miasmatic flows, which previously run over the streets, opened up wide boulevards to ventilate the city. The disciplinary mechanism of the quarantine was embedded in a biopolitical mechanism, which controlled the epidemiological risks by optimizing the circulation of air, water, goods, people in the open environment of the city. However, since that biopolitical mechanism was slow, since it took a significant amount of time and resources, the quarantine authorities combined it with the brisk mechanism of the market. They promised a small salary to anyone who would put herself in a quarantine as well as a sizeable reward to all who would overcome the disease. Since the contagion started to mean more than deprivation, since it became a source of profit, the crowds flooded the quarantine posts without any coercion. After a couple of months the disease, which the authorities finally managed to identify as plague, was already under control.

The current pandemic has triggered similar disciplinary, biopolitical and market mechanisms, but they do not quite work. The disciplinary mechanisms are limited because, although the streets are empty, the cells of the cities, regions, states are still traversed by flows of goods and laborers: the first line workers, the essential workers, the truck drivers, the students, immigrants, seasonal workers trying to get back home. Even the cells of our homes have been permeable. I enjoyed my thrilling trips to the supermarket twice a week, I even used to take out the garbage a couple of times every day (it was obviously necessary). Moreover, while I was staying at home, flows of images and signs traversed my room. I was even working from home, actually harder than before. The quarantine did not stop the circulation in the city, it just made it more costly (shopping for example started to consume more time and efforts because it required not only going to the supermarket, choosing groceries and paying but also disinfecting, waiting on queues, proving my right to be out, even negotiating, calculating, being wily).

The biopolitical mechanisms have not quite worked as well. Indeed, the quarantine authorities still register quantitative phenomena like morbidity, mortality, infection rates, they still identify danger spots like the vulnerable groups, the contact persons, the points of entry, the mass gatherings, they still intervene in order to reduce the danger. But now the calculation of the risks is placed to a significant extent on ourselves. Since the disciplinary mechanisms do not quite work, since I have not been fully locked in my home, when I was exercising my right to go to the supermarket, which appeal I was unable to resist, I could not ignore the fact that the disease had already broken out in my city, that the supermarket was a place of mass gathering, that I would have to observe the sanitary measures even if they frustrated me. Moreover, I could not avoid calculating the risks posed by my behavior. For example, if the disinfected air in the supermarket triggered my sneeze reflex, was I supposed to suppress it, to distance myself from the others, to hide from their anxiously reproachful gaze? If the disease can be transmitted by indirect contact, should I treat the shiny surfaces of the packed goods as danger spots, or I should rather believe the management vowing to disinfect fanatically any surface in the supermarket? And should I also believe the experts claiming that the disease can be transmitted by door handles or shoes but not by groceries? No matter how I was calculating such risks, even when I chose to behave irresponsibly, I could not help problematizing my behavior, I unlearned to consider it to be spontaneous or natural, I learned to analyze my behavior into details, to estimate the deviation of any detail from the sanitary norms, to balance carefully the norms with the inertia of my habits and the pressure of my desires. Thus the calculation of risks in the current pandemic has not quite functioned as in modern biopolitics. As it has been transposed from the plane of the population to the plane of the individual, it functions as a pedagogical mechanism. And it functions also as a psychological mechanism because I am actually unable to calculate most of the risks posed by the voyage to the supermarket. For example, should I be worried, if I lower my mask, and someone sneezes nearby? Is the risk of transmission by indirect contact big enough to disinfect the groceries at home, or it is not worth the effort? Do I risk spreading the disease by paying in cash? The biopolitical apparatuses calculate risks by amassing a large number of individual cases, but I have to calculate the risks of singular events which remain beyond the scope of the law of large numbers like that particular sneeze, my personal negligence, the unavoidable contact with the cashier. No matter how I calculate such singular risks, the results do not feel more certain than any other alternative. In effect, the calculation of risks, transposed in the individual plane by the biopolitical security apparatuses, inescapably produces a residual uncertainty, insecurity, anxiety.

Photo of the Italian city Forlì made by Laura Bernardelli in spring 2020.

The market mechanisms have not functioned quite like in the modern epidemics because they do not only stimulate desirable behaviors but also intensify power. The public authorities provide to the affected by the pandemic such a generous assistance that many friends see in it the eclipse of neoliberalism, the dawn of a new welfare state. But the government assistance generates credit because even if it has the form of grants, subsidies, social benefits, it will be funded by public debt. After the 2008 crisis, we already know that massive debt does not indicate the end of neoliberalism, quite the opposite, it is the perfect product of late capitalism, free from the restrictions of the material production, able to extract surplus value not only from the actual labor but also from the reserve, devalued, potential labor power.^[3] The burden of the public debt that is going to be accumulated in the looming economic crisis will shape our individual and collective lives for a long time because, in contrast with providing food to the poor, the economic assistance funded by debt imposes discipline.^[4] As our governments will spend in defense of life more than we have, as we will owe to the creditors even more than we have been given, we will be forced to decrease the value of our lives or to derive more value from our lives and the lives of the others by exploiting them more.

Yet if the disciplinary, biopolitical and market mechanisms have not quite worked in the current quarantine, how can one explain its power? After the 1770–1772 Moscow plague, the quarantines were rarely powerful enough to stop the life of cities. During the 19th century cholera epidemics, they were targeted at the travellers.^[5] The quarantine authorities tried to stop the disease by arresting the ships in the ports, by placing quarantine posts on the borders and on the roads to the cities. Yet when in 1824 the mighty French state tried to control the movement between the cities and their provinces, the restrictions were soon eroded by the flows of goods and people.^[6] While the cholera kept on returning in the second half of the 19th century, the quarantines provoked a widespread resistance if they impeded the life of the city.^[7] At the beginning of the 20th century, they became even more fragile. The strictest quarantine against the Spanish flu, in Australia, Fiji, the Canary Islands was focused again on the ports, although the authorities also recommended wearing masks, forbade the mass gatherings, particularly the cinema, and advised social distancing from the infected.^[8] Elsewhere the quarantine authorities experimented with other measures, in Spain they tried to control the railway stations and the borders with France and Portugal, in Iceland – to isolate Reykjavik from the rest of the country, in the United Kingdom – to educate the public by playing a short documentary before the movies. Nevertheless the efficiency of the quarantine measures was undermined by the chaos of the postwar years to such an extent that many experts declared the quarantine "impractical".^[9]

Of course, one can argue that today the technologies of surveillance and public hygiene are far more advanced and efficient. Indeed, if the quarantine measures in my city were imposed by the police, they would have been scattered like the police posts and sporadic like the police patrols. But I knew that the streets were scanned by the mechanical eyes of the drones, that my phone registered my location, trajectory, contacts. After the first weeks of shortage, the market offered disinfectant and masks in such abundance that one could choose between different brands, specifications, styles. And the contemporary credit mechanisms are undoubtedly more flexible, frugal and far-reaching than the rewards or the bread distributed during the 1770–1772 Moscow plague.

Nevertheless I think that the power of the current quarantine cannot be explained only by the efficiency of the surveillance, the markets and the public hygiene. The pandemic has triggered an additional mechanism. After all, why I have stopped walking in the park, which I kept watching in torment on the other side of the courtyard fence? I am perhaps too self-assured, but I do not fear the disease. After the first days of the quarantine, I had already marked the blind spots of the police and the drones. I could easily escape the surveillance of my phone by leaving it at home. I was ready even to endure the mercilessly reproaching looks of my neighbors. Moreover, I was convinced that the deserted park posed a far less serious danger than the supermarket, the hospital or even the frequent trips to the trash cans where the neighbors often gathered as if by accident. Yet I knew that since we were not quite locked at home, there was a risk that I could turn out to be an asymptomatic spreader, that I could infect someone else, that I could not calculate or control that risk, that the infected other could suffer or die, that even if she would overcome the disease, she could transmit it to others, so in effect I would be contributing to the increase in the infection rate and therefore to the extension, perhaps even to the aggravation of the quarantine measures that I found so depressing. Furthermore, the authorities, the media, the relatives, the friends on the social media incessantly asked me to be responsible. How could I resist such an appeal, such an interpellation? If I were asked to accept the responsibility for myself, I could have responded that I was ready to pay the price of the risk I was running. Yet how could I bear the responsibility for the risk I pose to others who are not even individuals but populations, virtual others composed of quantitative phenomena and stochastic processes?

On the other hand, how can I argue against the appeal to be responsible towards such virtual others? I cannot object that the appeal does not correspond to the facts because it is not about what is happening but rather about what can happen, it refers to a possible rather than to an actual state of affairs (for this reason, it is not convincing to criticize the quarantine as a state of exception which is not sufficiently motivated to the extent that the corona virus death rate is comparable to the death rates of other infectious diseases).^[10] I cannot dispute the appeal to be responsible towards the others by citing knowledge about myself because the point is what might happen to a population. I cannot rely on knowledge what has happened to actual others because the actual others are singular, while my responsibility derives from risks calculated on the basis of quantified infections and deaths. Of course, I can be defiant or crafty but this will not absolve me from responsibility, it will only make me irresponsible.

This mechanism of responsibilization, of constituting each and all as subjects of responsibility, has played a key role in halting the life of my city. I believe that it is important to problematize it because it is linked to other mechanisms that exploit its power: an apparatus of redistribution that is going to turn a significant share of the world economy into debt to the global financial institutions; a regime of austerity which is going to turn the social rights into privileges; surveillance devices that have already metamorphosed the tracing of our metadata, contacts, locations from a privacy violation into an unquestionable necessity; security apparatuses which associate our behavior with frequencies, probabilities, risks exercising a subtle but ubiquitous control; mechanisms of sovereign power which can transform our daily lives into a public good that can be taken away.

Yet how can one criticize the constitution of oneself as a subject of responsibility towards virtual others without being irresponsible?
The regimes of responsibilization articulate discursive figures of irresponsibility without which responsibility would be an empty concept.^[11] I think that it is important to criticize the figures of irresponsibility produced by the current pandemic. I do not mean that one should take the side of those who act irresponsibly or that one should denounce their oppressors because in this way one will achieve nothing but blindness to the complex interplay between power and freedom which is crucial to late modern governmentality. We should rather try to understand the amalgamation of small, momentary, situated reasons that shape the irresponsible behavior. In the last couple of months I had the opportunity to witness many types of such behavior: immigrants risking the lives of others to escape destitution; care workers locked in the homes of their employers trying to open up a space for privacy; teenagers deprived from what they consider to be their real lives; old people feeling the breath of death too close to deny themselves their last pleasures; lonely persons calling an ambulance just to talk to somebody; middle-aged men violating the sanitary rules to reassure themselves in their eclipsing masculinity; housewives appearing every day before the merciless tribunal of their families. If responsibilization is a key mechanism of the governmental apparatuses triggered by the current pandemic, then in order to think about it critically, we should try to demonstrate that no one is irresponsible.

---

^[1] This is also intended as a rewriting of the account of the power apparatuses triggered by contagious diseases in Michel Foucault, "The Birth of Social Medicine," in Michel Foucault, The Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, vol. 3: Power (New York: The New Press, 1997), 145; Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978 (Basingstoke: Pallgrave Macmillan, 2007), 24 ff., 85 ff.

^[2] Soloviev, S. 1879. Istoria Rossii s Drevneishih Vremen. V. 29. St. Petersburg: Tovarishtestvo "Obshtestvennaia polza", 1026–51 [Соловьев, С. История России с древнейших времен]

^[3] See for example the analysis of the production of gold in (Marx 1956, 44, 199–201).

^[4] Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man (Amsterdam: Semiotext(e), 2012), 126.

^[5] U.S. Bureau for Foreign and Domestic Commerce: Cholera in Europe in 1884: Reports from Councils of the United States (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1885), 65–66.

^[6] Paul Rabinow, French Modern: Norms and Forms of Social Environment (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), 36. On the liberalization of quarantine during the XIXc. in the wake of the criticism of its effects from the perspective of classical liberalism see Mark Harrison, Contagion: How Commerce Has Spread Disease (New Haven & London: Yale UP, 2012) 51–2, 66–7, Alison Bashford, "Maritime Quarantine: Linking Old World and New World Histories," in Alison Bashford, ed., Quarantine: Local & Global Histories (London: Palgrave, 2016), 11.

^[7] See for example the criticism of the "nominal, illusory" cholera quarantine in the United States in Keating, J. M. A History of the Yellow Fever: The Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1878 in Memphis, Tennessee. Memphis: Howard Association 1879, 289–291.

^[8] Niall Johnson, Britain and the 1918–1919 Influenza Pandemic: A Dark Epilogue (London: Routledge, 2006), 122–26.

^[9] Johnson: Britain and the 1918–1919 Influenza Pandemic, 124, 143.

^[10] See for example the essay by Giorgio Agamben (Agamben, G. 2020. L'invenzione di un'epidemia. Quodlibet, https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-l-invenzione-di-un-epidemia) and its criticism from a closely related theoretical perspective in Esposito, R. 2020. Curati a oltranza. Antinomie, https://antinomie.it/index.php/2020/02/28/curati-a-oltranza/.

^[11] See for example Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 65–66, and Hristov, M. 2012. "Figuri na naroda pri Fuko: Narodat Kato vlastovi obekt", Critique and Humanism, 38: 201–22 [Христов, М. Фигури на народа при Фуко: Народът като властови обект.].