Good day.
I recently finished Foucault’s Collège de France lectures from 1975-76, so now it’s time to move on to the 77-78 lectures. There’s some interesting prefatory stuff in the first one (11 Jan 78) that made me think about the contemporary response to the COVID pandemic, which just had its third birthday.
In talking about biopower, security and space, Foucault addresses the fascinating proliferation of visions of town organization and order, utopian urban planning and so on, that happened, or rather started, at the close of the 17th century and into the 18th century. One very small detail caught my eye, concerning the reconstruction of the town of Nantes. I was especially interested in the first principle:
It involved cutting routes through the town, and streets wide enough to ensure four functions. First, hygiene, ventilation, opening up all kinds of pockets where morbid miasmas accumulated in crowded quarters, where dwellings were too densely packed. So there was a hygenic function (p. 18, my emphasis).
This brought me back in a horizontal or rhizomatic way to an older interest, namely that of the shift from the miasma theory of disease transmission to germ theory.1 The early visions of urban reform mentioned by Foucault were influenced by an understanding of disease and disorder caused by “bad air,” toxic miasmas that settled in urban pockets especially during the night hours. The public health solution to epidemics of cholera was to allow for the movement and circulation of air, which in turn led to urban reforms and a revolution in the way that urban space was conceptualized and constructed.
We live in a different time, of course, one shaped by germ theory rather than visions of “night air.” And yet what’s interesting about this shift in emphasis is the medico-political dimension, the way we have come to think in the current frame about the spread of a virus like COVID-19: precisely because we don’t think of epidemics or endemic conditions caused by formations or constructions of urban space, the issue of infection (and various forms of prophylactic prevention) become individuated. We address the threat of viral spread by wearing masks, washing hands, and eventually, getting inoculated. It’s fascinating to me that state powers don’t mandate air circulation in interior spaces, pursue more rigorous protocols of particulate filtering and movement, and so on; there were some voices who raised this issue — Zeynep Tufekci for example — but for the most part, the issue of air purity and circulation was never on the table as a public health response. Yes, to be sure, restaurants and bars opened up outside dining and drinking spaces, but this was for the most part ad hoc and not formally codified; we certainly haven’t seen a profound boom in sanitary engineering reforms of the kind that nineteenth century cities underwent, for example. This to me is both baffling and completely predictable given the underlying conceptual and economic forces underlying contemporary public health priorities.
Put simply: miasma theory tends to support collective, community solutions, while the germ theory of disease supports a kind of “cellular discipline” which focuses on the individual and his or her behaviors.
See Laura Otis’s excellent book Membranes: Metaphors of Invasion in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Medicine and Politics (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).