From: Keith Elis (hagbard@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Tue May 13 2003 - 20:24:09 MDT
Mike Lorrey:
> Furthermore, the precedent set by the gay community in
> opposing HIV containment remedies in favor of individual
> rights has caused a massive resurgence in other communicable
> diseases like TB, Syphillis, Gonorrhea, etc and hampered the
> ability of health care workers to nip epidemics in the bud.
> The ability of the US health care system to deal with
> bioterror attacks is similarly compromised as a result.
Opposing government interference in favor of individual rights is just
as legitimate for homosexuals as it is for libertarians. A quarantine
doesn't just happen. It takes guns, and the threat of using them.
A relevant bit from http://cartome.org/reverse-panopticon.htm. I expect
many homosexuals were quite familiar with the issues quoted below, as
Foucault himself was an outspoken homosexual.
Keith
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In a seminal and controversial work of the late 1970’s “Discipline &
Punish: The Birth of the Prison”, the late French philosopher Michel
Foucault tracks the origins of modern institutions of discipline and
social control, like the prison, and in a much-debated chapter titled
“Panopticism” Foucault points out that by the late 17th century, efforts
to combat recurring outbreaks of the Plague --such as had savaged San
Gimignano and Europe in years following 1348 -- would eventually lead to
urban protocols and management technologies that unexpectedly provided a
structural and administrative prototype associated with the modern
surveillance state. Ironically, epidemiological controls would provide
the blueprint of what Foucault called: "the utopia of the perfectly
governed city".
Let me summarize Foucault’s fascinating description of disciplinary
mechanisms applied to towns under threat of Plague pandemic --
quarantines that, it turns out, would eventually follow very precise
urbanistic, administrative and bureaucratic designs:
Documents of the era describe quarantined towns being divided into
distinct quarters, each quarter governed by a so-called intendant, each
infected street placed under the authority of a syndic, who would keep
it under constant surveillance. Each house would be locked from the
outside by the syndic, who then submitted house-keys to the intendant of
the quarter. Keys would be returned to owners only after the quarantine
was lifted. Only intendants, syndics and guards were permitted to move
about the streets and between infected houses, or from one corpse to
another. All inhabitants were obliged to appear at their windows daily
to be individually inspected and scrutinized in regard to their state of
health. Each individual’s status was documented by written registration
submitted by syndics to intendants, and then remitted to the central
authority, the magistrate.
Thus, Foucault describes how under threat of pandemic Death, we find
disciplinary machinery in which "social space is observed at every
point... the slightest movement of individuals is supervised and
recorded...written documentation links the omnipresent and omniscient
hierarchic center with the quarantined periphery". To paraphrase
Foucault: during quarantines, the late 17th century inhabitant became
"immobilized in a frozen kind of space... an environment in which
inspection functioned ceaselessly... and the authoritarian gaze was
alert everywhere". This, says Foucault, was the “political dream of the
plague”. This was “the utopia of the perfectly governed city”.
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