RE: "Hysteria, Thy Name is SARS"

From: Keith Elis (hagbard@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Tue May 13 2003 - 20:24:09 MDT

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    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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