Abstract
Can we put a name to the world we are living in now? A few opaque terms have been set in motion – ‘Corona Pandemic’ or ‘COVID-19’, as if in a race against time to name a fact in a horizon of ambiguities. This short, time-bound reflection undertakes a minor semantic exercise about naming in governmentality. I sketch how an excavation of names could lead us to uncovering what responses and responsibilities are actualised in governmentalities by a process of naming, and what remains unnamed and subdued in that process.
The naming concern has nurtured many debates among semanticists, philosophers of language and, certainly, among those who study the social. 1 Drawing from them, the question of what names can do in describing, asserting knowledge and limiting the course of governmental action is an intriguing one. The pandemic and its related ‘naming’ is in a domain that ranges from concrete nouns to common nouns, and this is where, by taking some liberties, I use metaphor and metonym, 2 as devices with which to articulate a relation between naming and governmentality. The encounter between name, governmentality and the social in South Asia is not unknown. As Das and Copeman (2015: 5) describe in relation to various colonial and post-colonial bureaucratic practice, the connection between individual name with caste category, religion, demographics, criminal, tax, voting, immunisation and health records, law, policing and so forth is well established. When governmentality and naming go together, it becomes a channelling of power that organises, connects, limits and legitimates governmental affairs.
The affairs of governance—judicial, executive or legislative—can be thought of as an organisational exercise in classification, ordering, connecting and listing of functions and their agents—in effect, a cartographic exercise of responsibility and jurisdiction. My initial step here is to trace how the naming of a virus maps a few emergent points of connection in bureaucratic organisation. Following, in no particular order, is a small sketch of an expanding map of this organisation of what constitutes the governmentality of a virus. The cartographic exercise becomes intriguing because it follows a virus that is ‘new’ and its governance is unprecedented (as the World Health Organization—WHO information and others have maintained—this strand of the virus has not been detected before late 2019). The newness leads us to contemplate what governance of life does the naming of a virus lead to and what affairs of the virus leak into the political and the social.
COVID-19: The Governmentality of Naming
The WHO, on 11 March 2020, after a series of meetings and decisions 3 that tried to gauge the progress and nature of the disease, stated that the COVID-19 outbreak could be called a pandemic, that is, an international public health threat. On 24 March 2020, Prime Minister Modi in India announced a countrywide ‘lockdown’ for 3 weeks, which was then followed by two more phases of graded lockdown, lasting till the end of May. 4 In the first order ensuing from the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA), there is a reference to the WHO statement—marking a connection to a planetary jurisdiction. Two other Indian government platforms are invoked in that order—first, the National Disaster Management Act 2005 (henceforth NDMA05) and, second, the National Disaster Management Authority (henceforth NDMA). However, even before the NDMA and MHA issue their orders and guidelines, a number of states are advised to invoke the 1897 Epidemic Diseases Act 5 (EDA 1897) so that state-level measures could be enforced swiftly, as and when required. The EDA 1897, as is widely discussed, is an Act that the British powers in India brought into being during the bubonic plague in Mumbai.
What ‘names’ appear in these bureaucratic platforms so far? Let me identify a few that become common nouns (in single quotes below) as they appear in the governmental documents, in order to establish their cross-referentiality, their jurisdictions and responsibilities, which will, indeed, be the way in which these names will be actualised as action. The MHA order of 24 March mentions that it is in cognisance of the WHO statement that the prime minister, with due procedural diligence outlined in the NDMA05, recognises a ‘disaster’ situation and thereby orders a ‘lockdown’. The NDMA05 lists the kinds of governmental activities, practices and agents that will be called upon to affect a response system to a ‘disaster’, which is defined
6
as:
…‘disaster’ means a catastrophe, mishap, calamity or grave occurrence in any area, arising from natural or man made causes, or by accident or negligence which results in substantial loss of life or human suffering or damage to, and destruction of, property, or damage to, or degradation of, environment, and is of such a nature or magnitude as to be beyond the coping capacity of the community of the affected area.
The Act does not mention, in any section, any reference to a ‘medical’ or ‘public health’ disaster, so to speak. 7 The main measure that is mentioned in the MHA order as a guide to the containment of the virus is ‘social distancing’. The guidelines following the 24 March order include details of how ‘social distancing’ measures may be implemented and where. Specific duties of those responsible for the implementation of these guidelines, along with the punishment for their violation, are detailed.
The EDA 1897, as mentioned, was part of an earlier executive decision arrived at in a meeting on 11 March 2020. It was reported in a national newspaper
8
that:
It has been decided that all States/Union Territories should be advised to invoke provisions of Section 2 of the Epidemic Disease Act, 1897 so that all advisories being issued from time to time by the Ministry/State/UTs are enforceable, Health Secretary Preeti Sudan said on Wednesday, after a meeting of a high-level Group of Ministers here.
The EDA 1897 states administrative functions, both State and Central, that must come into being should there be an ‘outbreak of a dangerous epidemic disease’. It mentions the empowerment of government offices to regulate and impose segregation, monitoring of train and ship traffic, etc. So far, we do not have a definition or any indication of what nature of dangerous disease the COVID-19 outbreak is from these documents.
On ‘social distancing’, the earliest information that I could find at the time of writing was an Advisory on Social Distancing Measure, 9 which was issued by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW), where the interventions were expected to be in force till 31 March 2020—to be reviewed as per the evolving situation. The many establishments and events that are to shut down—schools, colleges, offices, malls or weddings, funerals, sporting events, etc—are listed. The mandatory measures of 1 m between persons, handwashing, proper disinfection of frequently touched surfaces, etc., are also mentioned. The current website of the MoHFW, however, has a document on its landing page where a description of what the virus is and how it affects the human system, as well as the ways in which it transfers between people, is available. The other apex body that takes over the medical procedures, information, facilities, monitoring and regulation of the response system is the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR). 10 As per their website, protocols for testing as well as lists of testing centres, kits, etc., are detailed. Current information on the disease as well as the vaccine is available on their website.
This brief sketch is akin to a timeline tracing when, as an unknown and unprecedented event unfolds, its tenuous facticity comes to be formulated through a naming process. This brings forth a governmentality, and in this small mapping of an expanding web of emerging departments, organisations and institutions, each with their functionalities, actions and agents of bureaucracy, the grappling with facticity names a medical jurisdiction, associates a precarious health preventive and an even more uncertain sense of the ‘public’ in public health. All in all, a metonymic chain of associations that emphasise how the naming of a biomedical governmentality unfolds in an emergency timeline.
Metaphors and Metonyms of a Virus
The cluster of governmental departments that I have connected together earlier gains their connectivity through proximity. Their proximity in governmental relationships is about their related functionalities brought together as ‘names’ that come together as proximal clusters, names such as ‘pandemic’, ‘epidemic’ and ‘disaster’. The suffixing or prefixing any of these terms with COVID-19 or coronavirus brings them into the realm of common nouns—the COVID-19 epidemic or the coronavirus pandemic. If a chain of contiguity were to be extended, a line could extend, in governmental language, from the naming of the fact of the pandemic to a locality, a home, a family and a named person. The entire contiguous chain of relationships—the metonymic chain—extending from the proper name of a person to the collective name of the pandemic will be the articulation of the chain of named bureaucratic and jurisdictional infrastructure, both conceptual and functional, that knit together spheres of meaning and intended action. The experience of the state in the realm of infection, whether individually or in a collective, can literally be mapped onto the governmental network, that I had started a sketch of earlier. And it is in reference to this tracing of metonymic connections that the gaps, the chasms and the disconnections—or literally, the un-named—will appear.
The metaphoric articulation here, on the other hand, takes us into the substitution of the literal nature of the virus, its mobility and pathways of contagion into a governmentality reaching into a pattern of the social, namely social distancing. In trying to halt the advance of the virus, which is spread by physical contact or proximity, a literal reversal strategy of separation becomes the central crucible of bio-governmentality. The principle of contact is substituted by the principle of separation. Of course, this exercise of finding substituted meaning can be extended further into other arenas where, for example, the principle of separation is now substituted into a bio/national border with virus/enemy aggression. As an illustration of this, let me continue with the metaphoric implications of governmental information. There is another website 11 that was brought into the ambit of COVID-19-related information pages in the mygov.in portal—a website maintained to provide public information and outreach in all manner of governmental activity. Titled ‘Join the war against COVID-19 - Register as Volunteer’, this webpage has a set of pages that includes blogs, discussions, etc., which encourage people to contribute their COVID-19-related experiences. The ‘fight’ with the virus is also seen to include a ‘self-reliance’ page, where ideas and discussions are shared online by a few on what India could do to achieve such goals. While the success of the website is another issue, the media and governmental proliferations of this metaphor do not need emphasising. The war against the virus by corona/COVID warriors, the winners and the losers, etc., are all part of this phrasing that has been a constant presence over the past few months and is likely to become the pandemic’s main slogan, not just in India, but globally.
The governmentality that emerges from this play of metaphor and metonymy leads us to what the calling out and naming of a biological organism, that is, the virus, actualises or obliterates. I suggest that this semantic exercise allows us to trace what remains unnamed and concealed in governance in the wake of a pandemic. It may not be an exaggeration to equally suggest that in the destiny of these name plays, in effect, is the destiny of life as it unfolds through this period of time and beyond.
Whole-of-government, Whole-of-society 12
At the end of this reflection, I conclude in the shape of a question—can the responses and responsibility of governance in this crisis, which by all arguments is unprecedented, be tracked by the kind of semantic or naming exercise I have sketched briefly earlier? The current mapping of responses, preparedness and functionalities in the Indian scenario do follow up on the calling out of a public health crisis—and the main measure adopted to tackle this is social distancing. The very ‘collective–common’ meaning ensemble imbued in the naming of something as ‘social’ takes any response far beyond the limitations of health-related measures. On 11 March 2020, when WHO characterises the spread of COVID-19 as a pandemic, their response timeline includes the following:
Recognising that COVID-19 was not just a public health crisis but one that would touch every sector, he restated (the Director General -my addition) WHO’s call - made from the beginning - for countries to take a whole-of-government, whole-of-society approach, built around a comprehensive strategy to prevent infections, save lives and minimize impact.
A ‘whole-of-government, whole-of-society’ kind of response involves a wider response system—but the branches of government called into action in a ‘lockdown’ and the details of the guidelines seem to speak more eloquently of a ‘law and order’ situation. Quarantine; track and trace; punishment of violators; the closure of all public movement, schools, colleges and offices; containment zones; and curfew hours are all in tandem with health crisis disguised into a security crisis.
What remains disassociated in metonymy or unsubstituted in metaphor in this current context seems to be the inability to understand that while the virus is a singular ‘biological fact’, social distancing goes to the whole of the social itself. The governance of social life is a complex that cannot be divided and governed in insular compartments. What remain as metaphoric gaps or metonymic disconnects are the gaps that governmental work mis-associates or disconnects. One of the lasting imprints of the Indian lockdown will remain the mass exodus of daily wage workers, the most precarious group in any social whole. The disconnect between emergency response and disaster responsibility, on the one hand, and ‘whole-of-government, whole-of-society’ (which includes the economy) approach, on the other, seems to be the inability to contain them all within the same meaning universe. Naming and containing the fact of this submicroscopic lifeless protein seem to have blinkered the response imagination in governance to a singular one of a security apparatus—where the transgressions of the virus are mistaken to be acts of human disobedience. The strategy of containing the social life of the virus has been to constrict its vehicle—the human body—and hence the constriction on human movement. Yet, without corporeal proximity, the sustenance of the social is threatened. The challenge, thus, is possibly the measured governance of physical mobility in physical space, such that an optimal economy of movement is prioritised—a societal triage of sorts. Temporary lockdowns of human movement are possibly slowing down the social life of the virus, but it implies a fast collapse of human society. Social distancing is a misnomer that signals a misdirection of semantic activity, and in India, it has no therapeutic value. Rather, it can share a toxic semantic sphere of social exclusion. Calling the unknown into scientific being with a name might have its hazards, but pinning down an unknown fact in governmentality might obscure and blur what governance is about—namely the conduct of life as such.
Footnotes
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.