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"Being reprimanded for going out on the street is science fiction"

2020-05-18T20:22:58.614Z


FIGAROVOX / TRIBUNE - The deconfinement reveals a new power system which borders on totalitarianism according to sociologist Shmuel Trigano. The individual is no longer apprehended by virtue of his actions, but according to his state of health.


Shmuel Trigano is Professor Emeritus of Universities (Sociology, Paris Nanterre).

The deconfinement occurred, it becomes possible to take distance to reflect on the strange experience that we lived. I would like to address the political aspect of the phenomenon. The public therapy imagined by governments has engaged unique police and surveillance systems. I would like to look at them from the outside, obliquely, without the prophylactic intention that drives them and that everyone understands (or almost).

A new kind of power system was put in place during this period. It did not apply to goods or uses but on the very condition of existence, to the body of individuals, who, because they were sick (or could be) were deprived of the freedom to move around, excluded from sociality and even from kinship, to the point of becoming anonymous objects of a digital hunt monitoring their actions.

That the state of health is held objectively to be a responsibility for which it is necessary to account is something new.

To be apprehended and reprimanded for having gone out on the street and not having respected confinement has something fantastic, close to science fiction. Whether the disease or state of health is objectively held to be a responsibility that must be accounted for is something new. The same goes for the ban on people over 70 years of age moving away from their home. Would it mean that age itself constitutes a violation, while contamination and age are not a choice but are the result of a condition suffered passively? The protocol of deconfinement, too, in its smallest details, including the living space which the individual enjoys in public space (qualified as “social distancing”), has something dantesque about it. How to define this new rule? It is "ad personam" and has no universal scope. It is no longer race, religion, which encloses the individual, it is his state of health? A criterion falling under determinism and not freedom.

Read also: Who is at risk from the Covid-19?

Insofar as this regime is no longer part of a medical device (within the framework of the hospital), but state (public space) it can be qualified as an (objectively) police regime. It is so by the way it imposes its law, namely terror, panic fear which the alarming declarations of the powers helped to install. This terror had the effect of absolute authority, of the kind to which one obeys without constraint, as out of conviction, and reason, without causing questioning and even less rebellion.

Political power hid behind the committee of medical experts in order not to be held accountable.

This authority, of fundamentally political scope, was however based on another authority, that of the committee of medical experts behind which the political power took shelter throughout the crisis. It was he who made the decision: authority untouchable because not political, reporting only to the research community, and therefore possessing unlimited power, confirmed in addition by the invincible halo of Science , especially since this science deals with life and death.

Such a power is unprecedented in the political arena, except that one already has the taste for it with the abuse of the legal power which characterizes the judicialization of the citizen life, in which the decision depends on a areopagus of judges (here of doctors) making decisions without being elected or being monitored (and in Italy as in France the question of whether the elderly should be intubated or not has raised the specter of this evolution towards a right of life and death). We have here a first which could augur worrying tomorrows. The French controversy around Professor Raoult had a very beneficial consequence from this point of view because it helped to show that Science is not infallible and that it concealed dissensions, schools, groups that collided. It showed that it was crossed by issues of power and conflicts of interest. As in politics. The current threat of "the second wave" (in September, with tens of thousands of deaths announced here and there), shows that the system is perpetuated even in the deconfinement when there is a hypothesis but not a certainty ( "science fiction" for Professor Raoult).

Read also: "Consensus is Pétain": Professor Raoult criticizes the scientific council

One of the most astonishing aspects of this system also manifests itself on the economic level: the fact of being obeying health requirements should be gratifying but it immerses you, depending on whether you are powerful or miserable, in ruin and poverty. Here too the amazement is maximum: everything was (more or less) good, then suddenly everything collapsed and we find ourselves immersed in inexplicable adversity.

The political system of the pandemic thus gives no advantage to its members, except that of living (while the low mortality rate on a general level is not what mathematics experts had announced). Economic survival will then be paid for by subsidies, debt deferrals, etc., which will make the State the great and only provider of a subsistence minimum. The pandemic regime wanted to save the population at the cost of its precipitation into an economic abyss, that is to say by damaging the subsistence even of the confined happily spared (but no one will know what it would have been without confinement) .

The deconfinement pays for an additional control on the ground.

As for the exercise of power, it was entrusted to the art of speech and to the devices which propagate it, namely the news media which, during this period, only talked about this subject, forgetting the rest of the world and accentuating the anxiety of the population. At the start of the epidemic, they relayed the announcement of hundreds of thousands of possible deaths that WHO and Chinese communication confirmed and they kept coming back to it over time with daily statistics . It was not made clear that the mathematical model of "experts" could be wrong. The deconfinement pays for an additional control on the ground (by the police, the army in certain countries): the authorizations of exit and displacement on certain distances, the right to use the means of mass transport go thus perpetuate the police application of the instructions.

It will also be noted that this model of power has generated an illusion of community and sociality, a "virtual" sociality. It frees us from the weight of our body and space by reconstructing them in accordance with the codes of mediatization, that is to say of the substitution for real life for a represented life, escaping the reflexivity of real sociality.

The settling of this experience will be long.

The settling of this nightmarish experience will be long. Let us hope that it does not prejudge what the future could be and which already exists in the totalitarian Chinese regime which seems to have served as a model, albeit in the unthought mode, for Western democratic states.

It is a sinister vision that that which allows sociological distancing - which is not "social distancing" - but which can maintain that the facts here described and gathered are not objective facts? They have their reality, their weight, regardless of our intention or the meaning we give them ...

Source: lefigaro

All news articles on 2020-05-18

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