Pandemics have been throughout history terrifying and convulsive events with uncertain outcome. These dramatic events, that sometimes demand extreme political decisions, tend to exacerbate other conflicts that are latent in society, amplify political tensions and in some instances coalesce society for the future. One common denominator in exceptional situations, like terror attacks, is that pandemics open cracks for political power to penetrate deeper in its effort of governmental control.

Martin Wagner in his essay Defoe, Foucault, and the Politics of the Plague, takes Daniel Defoe’s fictional account of the 1665 Great Plague of London in A Journal of the year Plague Year under the scrutinizing lenses of Michel Foucault’s theory on political power. Foucault’s lectures at the College de France on January 1975, drew some ideas on individual agency, confinement and social control in times of pandemics. Foucault argues that plague replaced leprosy as a model of political control during the Bubonic plague episodes that lashed Europe from the late Middle Ages to the early eighteenth century. Europe’s political scene evolved from the “politics of the leprosy” to the “politics of plagues”. Leprosy involved “practices of exclusion, of casting out, and marginalization”¹ to keep the dangerous individuals “driven out in order to purify the community.”² Plagues instead involved quarantine, where “a territory was the object of a fine detailed analysis, of a meticulous spacial partitioning”³ with the objective of individual surveillance extended “to the fine grain of individuality”.⁴ To buttress his social theory of plague policy, Foucault wavers around the metaphors of two dreams; one is the “literary dream” of the plague, coming from the body of literature where plague appears as the “moment when individuals come apart and when the law is forgotten.”⁵ The second, the “political dream”, “in which the plague is rather the marvelous moment when political power is exerted to the full.”⁶ Defoe’s chronicle in A Journal of the year Plague Year, delves into the social behavior and quarantine practices at the time of the plague, and reveals how these two metaphorical dreams occur in the reality of the people of London. Wagner’s essay pivots around Foucault’s dreams, reconciling them through Defoe’s chronicle into a third one that he calls the “novelistic dream”. This novelistic dream wavers between the literary dream and the political dream coming to life in the stories of “healthy individuals who decide to shut themselves up before they are infected and before the government limits their movements and shuts them up”⁷ to survive isolated from the plague. Defoe’s literature of the plague and Wagner’s understanding of Foucault’s dreams present us with an opportunity to experience Covid-19 pandemic as a “metacommentary” of the three.

The elements that define the Literary, the Political and the Novelistic Dreams are easily recognizable looking at how our modern societies have behaved since the pandemic broke in the West in March 2020. Firstly I will shed my main focus in the concept of the novelistic dream,  what I would call public or civic responsibility, secondly I will mention what in my view is the social aspect of these dreams and how have helped in the eruption of society’s latent endemic issues.

According to Wagner, the novelistic dream is the one in which “the individual’s autonomy from government control and the government’s dream of perfect order are reconciled.”⁸ In his narrative, this is the confinement that just few can afford to inflict upon themselves. It responds to “the modern bourgeoise identity,”⁹ and I agree with Wagner description, as these individuals belong to a societal class where job is secure and can be performed remotely, households are large enough to allow distance between family members, children go to private schools, in some instances they own a second house out of the big cities, and therefore the “practice of shutting yourself up seems to enjoy privilege and status”.¹⁰ There is another class of citizens that in my opinion inhabit Foucault’s literary and political dream. These ones are usually blue collar, service and hospitality workers, and low income families that live in smaller houses where space is shared, have the necessity to work, or are forced show up at work with 102 DegF fever. These citizens do not own their decisions in respect of how to act in the pandemic because their decisions are limited by structure (social class, ethnicity, immigration status, customs, etc), instead of being a product of individual agency like is the case of the first ones. These are the ones most impacted by the pandemic. Finally in my opinion there is a third group that is halfway between the two. Their characteristic is disobedience as agency and are the ones that in the name of freedom and individual agency refuse to voluntarily lock themselves or wear a mask, and resist the law of the political dream to be imposed on them. Paradoxically these individuals in occasions enjoy the class status of the first ones but fervently oppose Defoe’s and Wagner’s novelistic dream by reason of partisanship, rebuttal of public health recommendations or civic responsibility.

One takeaway from the present pandemic and past ones is the tension between these three dreams and between the various attitudes citizens have adopted depending on which dream they inhabit. Between the ones that avoided confrontation with authorities by adopting “a form of agency that is in line with the law, without being a mere product of the law.”¹¹ The ones that when the governmental control becomes visible they resist and escape the confinement, or not wear a mask, calling into question the futility of this new sanitary dictatorship and surveillance regime. And finally the ones that belong to the lower class and are subject to strict demarcation and confinement, and swell the mortality data lists.

In line with Wagners analysis, present pandemic has revealed how social behavior has not changed in times of pandemics over the centuries. Defoe describes how the plague leashed specially on the poor, how the wealthy managed to scape the cities and even conspiracy theories rose driving fear or denial. Today, the poor and certain ethnicities are more vulnerable because their living and labor conditions, the wealthy flee cities like NY to the outskirts where population density is lower, illegal immigrant workers are forced to keep working, labour security determines chances to be more exposed the disease. A Journal of the Plague Year narrative has become overtime a contemporary account that depicts grand parallelism with todays Covid pandemic in a discerning fashion. But more over is a source of experience that shows how social issues that were before latent have erupted because the virus.

Notes

1. Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures in College de France 1974-1975. Ed Valerio Marchetti and Antonella Salomoni. Trans. Graham Burchell. page 43.

2. Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures in College de France 1974-1975. Ed Valerio Marchetti and Antonella Salomoni. Trans. Graham Burchell. Page 44.

3. Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures in College de France 1974-1975. Ed Valerio Marchetti and Antonella Salomoni. Trans. Graham Burchell. Page 45.

4. Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures in College de France 1974-1975. Ed Valerio Marchetti and Antonella Salomoni. Trans. Graham Burchell. Page 46.

5. Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures in College de France 1974-1975. Ed Valerio Marchetti and Antonella Salomoni. Trans. Graham Burchell. Page 47.

6. Ibid.

7. Martin Wagner. Defoe, Foucault and the Politics of the Plague. SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Volume 57, Number 3, Summer 2017. Page 509.

8. Martin Wagner. Defoe, Foucault and the Politics of the Plague. SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Volume 57, Number 3, Summer 2017. Page 503.

9. Martin Wagner. Defoe, Foucault and the Politics of the Plague. SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Volume 57, Number 3, Summer 2017. Page 510

10. Martin Wagner. Defoe, Foucault and the Politics of the Plague. SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Volume 57, Number 3, Summer 2017. Page 509.

11. Martin Wagner. Defoe, Foucault and the Politics of the Plague. SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Volume 57, Number 3, Summer 2017. Page 515