Three Dreams, One Quarantine Nightmare: Am I in control?

Opinion analytical piece by Tala Majzoub, Staff Writer

April 1st, 2020

First, Second Dream:

What happens when a dream is completely engrossing, it jeopardizes your mental, social, emotional and physical prosperity? “Plague is met by order”,[1] assured Foucault, making us ponder the very essence of individual agency when political power takes over. In Michel Foucault’s view, the measures followed in the plague towns across Europe—the first major outbreak of the bubonic plague hit Europe in 1348, the last in 1720—provide a model for the new regimes of surveillance and governmental control that were yet to arise in the eighteenth century. During his lecture at the Collège de France on 15 January 1975, Foucault discusses two ideal fantasizes that the bubonic plague inspired in him, what he calls the “literary dream” and the “political dream”. The literary dream honours in the plague the anarchy, the termination of the boundaries of individuality, and the total loss of order. “There is a literature of plague,” Foucault asserts in his lecture, “that is a literature of the decomposition of individuality; a kind of orgiastic dream in which plague is the moment when individuals come apart and when the law is forgotten.”[2] He then explains that the plague, according to the political dream, is the “the marvellous moment when political power is exercised to the full”: “Plague is the moment when spatial partitioning and subdivision … of a population is taken to its extreme point.”[3] Earlier in the lecture, Foucault outlines in detail the measures by which the governmental surveillance, partitioning of space, and control of movement results in the “the division and subdivision of power extending to the fine grain of individuality.”[4] In other words, the plague town, or quadrillage[5], became the experiment for unprecedented extension of state power over the people and their very essence. Sounds familiar?

Third Dream, One Quarantine Nightmare: 

In one of his plague books, Daniel Defoe (author of Robinson Crusoe) manages to perfectly reconcile both of Foucault’s fantasies: the government’s dream of perfect order and the individual’s autonomy from government control. Defoe deals with the strategies of voluntary self-confinement extensively from 1722, in his political and religious treatise Due Preparations for the Plague, as Well for the Soul as Body. Due Preparations narrates the story of a grocer who shuts himself at home during the London epidemic of 1665. Defoe dwells, in boring detail, on the provision required by the grocer’s family of ten during their long house arrest.  The grocer buys “three Fat Bullocks … and the Flesh Pickl’d and Barrel’d up,” as well “six Barrels of Pork” and numerous “Cheeses, particularly out of Wiltshire and Warwickshire and Gloucestershire, about Six Hundred Weight in the Whole,” including “five very large old Cheshire Cheeses.”[6] In contemporary terms, this would probably mean lots and lots of toilet paper. Defoe conjures before our eyes the detailed account of the grocer’s strategic planning, and the list continues. However, Defoe does little more than just that, as he introduces what Martin Wagner identifies to be the third dream: the “novelistic dream”.[7] Wagner explains that this novelistic dream demonstrates the answer to questions of whether we can still assert our agency within legally defined borders – what is commanded by the state authorities can still be a product of our very own individual agency.

Defoe’s peculiar interest in the detailed elements of the grocer’s actions, behaviors that are not covered by the City’s orders, indicate an epistemological shift where the grocer’s entire behavior is a result of his individual, autonomous agency. The novelistic dream then, of autonomous will, allows us to reinterpret the obedient behavior as a self-directed accomplishment: the practice of shutting yourself up is narrated as an essentially self-oriented adventure that explains the citizens’ foresight and good management, thus redirecting the agency to the individuals. Behavior demanded by law is reconceptualised as a product of individual agency, and lawful behavior now becomes contingent on the individual before depending on the state power that first defined it.[8] Defoe’s plot about a man who shuts himself re-envisions obedience as agency, rather than remnants of individual influence after the escalation of major governmental control.

Am I in control?

Just like the prisoner in Bentham’s Panopticon who always believes he is being watched even when he isn’t, one might argue that the man who shuts himself up, completely internalized the order of movement control that he begins to exert this control over himself. Is it truly agency then? In truth, we ought to remember that we are not really prisoners and we are not under the Lebanese government’s measuring gaze… Instead, we are redirecting the agency to ourselves here, taking the initiative to stay home without anyone literally compelling us to. We are remaining within the structures of the rational COVID-19 regulations while simultaneously asserting our own agency. Then, if Foucault highlights that “the plague is met by order”, Defoe establishes that it is plausible for us to act independent in a disciplined society. I guess what I’m trying to say here, is that in the face of the Coronavirus nightmare, we can still develop a form of agency of our own that is in line with the law, without necessarily being a mere product of the law. How exactly? I’m not here to spoil or play all my cards at once, it all depends on the novel you’re writing. The grocer muses and muses on the provisions needed by his family. What happens in your story? 

[1] Foucault, Michel, and Alan Sheridan. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Vintage Books, New York, 1995, p: 197.

[2] Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974– 1975, ed. Valerio Marchetti and Antonella Salomoni, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2003), p. 47.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Michel Foucault, Abnormal, p: 46.

[5] Lepetic, Misha. “Foucault's Plague.” 3 Quarks Daily, 3 Quarks Daily, 20 Jan. 2019, www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2013/03/foucaults-plague.html.

[6] Defoe, Due Preparations for the Plague, as Well for the Soul as Body (London, 1722), pp. 68–9.

[7] Wagner, Martin. "Defoe, Foucault, and the Politics of the Plague." SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, vol. 57 no. 3, 2017, p. 503. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/sel.2017.0021.

[8] Wagner, Defoe, Foucault, and the Politics of the Plague, p: 513.