17 Minor sovereignty and digital mourning
“I liked the doctors quite well, and I did not feel belittled by their doubts. The annoying thing was that their authority loomed larger by the hour. One is not aware of it, but these men are kings. Throwing open my rooms, they would say, “Everything here belongs to us.” They would fall upon my scraps of thought: “This is ours.” They would challenge my story: “Talk,” and my story would put itself at their service. In haste, I would rid myself of myself. I distributed my blood, my inner most being among them, lend them the universe, gave them the day.” Maurice Blanchot, The Madness of the Day, 1973
On March 28, 2020, New York Times journalist Ali Watkins ran a story on the experiences of the paramedics during the first wave of the surge in the numbers of infected people. The article has reported that “With coronavirus cases mounting, emergency workers are making life-or-death decisions about who goes to a hospital, and who is left behind.” Suddenly, this supposedly feudal, medieval type of power, sovereignty, which was thought to be overtaken by a more complicated biopolitical strategies that dissolved brutal exercise of right-to-kill-or-let-live, returned to the scene with full force, exactly at front of the biopower where it regulated reception of bodies into its assemblage.
The conditions of return for this power can be traced to an excess, namely, the surge in numbers of symptomatic populations, which exceeded the capacities of the hospital system. The very determination of excess is the political problematic. If hospital capacity is a not a fixed fact but a malleable socio-economic state, the modulation of excess in all the ways in which it can be accessed becomes a political practice. Yet, given the temporality of the unfolding of the pandemic, this sovereignty was distributed across the network of biopower. Therefore, the life-and-death decision called forth a minor sovereignty wherein the subjects who exercised it were not placed at the top of the command structures but at the ambulatory level. Different from the executioner who mechanically carries out the order, the paramedics were asked to make a calculated decision on the spot —to exercise sovereign discretion. Their calculations—both resonant and dissonant with data-related political performances commented upon in the previous chapter—were the dramatic tip of the biopolitical process whereby the demarcation of the line that separates inside from outside was dynamically made on the spot.
This minor sovereignty, with all its psychological weight, is what makes biopolitical interiority possible at its roots—where political technologies of medicine touches the population through para-medics.
“In the same way that the city’s hospitals are clawing for manpower and resources, the virus has flipped traditional Emergency Medical Services procedures at a dizzying speed. Paramedics who once transported people with even the most mild medical maladies to hospitals are now encouraging anyone who is not critically ill to stay home. When older adults call with a medical issue, paramedics fear taking them to the emergency room, where they could be exposed to the virus.”
The large numbers that saturate the hospital capacity can be broken down into a series of other capacities—such as the number of beds, doctors, nurses, ventilators, and surgical masks. These are temporarily fixed norms, temporarily flattened curves, at the moment of sovereign decision to select who goes to the hospital. Yet the excess over the hospital assemblage (doctors, nurses, masks, beds, ventilators) that founds the limited context of life-or-death-decisions of the paramedics is not grounded in a permanently fixed facticity which passively awaits sovereign deliberation. In fact, the pandemic has borne witnessed to an arbitrary degree of employment of the military’s organizational and logistical capacities to mobilize resources and to quickly transform and build infrastructure to match the surge in COVID cases. The facticity of the normal rate, aesthetically normalized in its circulation through the vague the standardization of an acceptable degree of new cases per day, oriented the degree and form of mobilization of military, state, and civil societal capacities. The apparatus which was not used with full intensity at the stage of prevention, was operationalized with liberty during the vaccination campaign.
The intensity of the sovereign position in which the paramedics found themselves in their selection of patients was dependent on other sovereign acts of framing. As opposed to the modern decentering and anonymization of power through protocols, sciences, and bureaucracies; the exercise of power has become a matter of personal decision over life and death. Neither the doctors at hospitals, nor the medical researchers in the universities who discipline, examine, and normalize the body and accumulate the knowledge about the body, but the paramedics who, in sensu strictu, are not doctors were given the duty to admit or reject bodies based on a medical evaluation of the condition of sick as either too sick or not sick enough.
The decision to exclude certain bodies from emergency medical treatment gets displaced to the paramedics, who, in this way assume a minor sovereignty in that they decide over life and death in the absence of definitive guidelines. This is a valuable event of revelation about the current state of the sovereign character of the power that relies on subjectivity, normalization and datafication. Sovereignty—bound with the excess over protocols and its resolution into decisions where decision seems impossible—takes the form of selections based on projected norms and thereby makes the hypothetical real. It is exercised under new intensive conditions and does not imply a simple return to a stage of power technically overcome. The pandemic is not a crisis that overwhelmed the affordances of the biopolitical system but was an event through which the biopolitical assemblage of medicine, economy and military has metamorphosed.
The National Health Service in England developed a “score tool for deciding which patients receive intensive care” quantifying away the problem of excess responsibility over life-or-death decisions. Accordingly, “doctors will classify patients according to three parameters – their age, frailty and the underlying conditions – according to a table distributed to clinicians . . . Patients with a combined score of more than eight points in all three categories should probably not be admitted to intensive care, according to the Covid-19 decision support tool, although clinical discretion may prevail.” With this protocol, absence or withdrawal of medical support from the population is normalized through an improvised protocol that relies on biopolitical knowledge of the success rates of treatments for specific populations. More precisely, the sovereign moment of the insertion of this protocol is absorbed into the interiority of the institution of The National Health Service and thereby eliminated its everyday, street level manifestation—which was momentarily visible in the decision of the paramedics, constituting a form of emergency/minor sovereignty.
Digital mourning as para-mourning
During the pandemic the genres of celebration and mourning were reinvented. New spatiotemporal arrangements generated by semi-official quarantines and digital connectivity created whole new events where life and death, continuity and rupture were socialized. For the classic French school of sociology, the ceremonial presence of participants to the social ritual marked one of the few occasions where abstraction of social fact become concrete as in funerals and weddings. With the digital transformations, the ceremonial manifestation and making of the identity of the society/cult is simultaneously both dispersed and contracted by enveloping massively large number of peoples.
In an episode of the popular TV show, The Office, the manager of the paper company, Michael Scott, finds himself in a financial conundrum. He consults with one of his coworkers, Creed, who advises him that he can declare bankruptcy to avoid paying his debts. Michael excited about this exit (which Creed calls nature’s do-over) compares the option to the witness-protection-program. He then enters into the main office space, which is filled with office workers in their cubicles and shouts
“I declare bankruptcy”. What does Michael misunderstand? The institutional or contextual necessities that render a speech act effective —truly performative. In a move similar to Michael’s declaration of bankruptcy, the governor of New York State has sent a tweet late in the morning on April 11, 2020, consisting of four sentences. In this tweet, he wrote:
“We mourn all those who passed away.”
His tweet aspires towards acknowledgment of absence and the striving for comprehensiveness, the adequacy of the social to itself, the governor affirming the self-identity of the social body. Yet instead of limiting himself by an acknowledgement of absence and of the necessary postponement—if not impossibility—of mourning, Cuomo attempts to perform the work of mourning in a tweet—which is received and interacted with several thousand accounts. For Bataille, what renders a social act meaningful is the expenditure, the consumption, beyond utility. In fact, Durkheim, in his anthropological study of the elementary form of religious life, shows that the ritual functions to intensify, expand, and amplify the affect —if not all together to create it. While it is impossible to say that the tweet was simply a simulacrum of mourning and it still demonstrates an expenditure, thus could be interpreted as an instance of joining or initiating the mourning without completing it.
Indeed, throughout these digital transitional events, the supposed self-presence of society—which Durkheim worked so hard to prove through his discipline founding research into the concretization of the ideal of society in ritual—seems to be laid bare as an evocation and an impossibility at the same time.
Works Cited
Blanchot, M. (1995). The madness of the day (L. Davis, Trans.). Barrytown/Station Hill Press. (Original work published 1973)
Cuomo, A. [@NYGovCuomo]. (2020, April 12). We lost an additional 783 New Yorkers yesterday. These are staggering numbers. Behind this number are individuals and families, and untold loss and pain. [Tweet]. X. https://x.com/NYGovCuomo/status/1249000036857413632
Lieberstein, P. (Writer & Director). (2007, October 4). Money (Season 4, Episodes 7–8) [TV series episode]. In R. Gervais & S. Merchant (Developers), The Office. NBC. https://youtu.be/C-m3RtoguAQ
Watkins, A. (2020, March 28). N.Y.C.’s 911 system is overwhelmed. ‘I’m terrified,’ a paramedic says. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/28/nyregion/nyc-coronavirus-ems.html
