BIG READ: Fencing against the needle — how anti-vaxxers can prick the state’s bubble

The end of January is the time of the Student Representative Council president, when he or she plots the next step of their political career, in the vein of we-can-be-1976-heroes too, or just feeling the need to justify your substantial stipend. Already there are rumblings of student protests on the way when universities come to life again, this time over vaccine mandates.

For vaxxers, especially immunocompromised ones like me, whose life was probably saved by my first Pfizer shot before I got Covid-19, this might look like a bad choice of issue to toyi-toyi with. After all, universities are where one is supposed to master the intricacies of immune systems and learn how they need to be trained by vaccines just like armies train their troops with war games.

But it would be a mistake to predict a tepid protest season. Not all anti-vaxxers believe the dinosaurs are explained by Lord of the Rings or the Mars helicopter is hidden under a bush near Upington; the more considered stances emerge from grappling with much deeper philosophical issues, some of which are at the heart of our political troubles.

Rejection of vaccine mandates seems selfish and dangerous to others, as one may then become a carrier of a killer disease. Medically this is already not wholly true, since the vaccinated can still carry Covid-19, which they can still spread in undetected ways. More plausible is the charge that anti-vaxxers set back the acquisition of herd immunity in a population, though the herd not being sufficiently exposed to the virus because of too much vaccination could be argued to make it vulnerable to new variants bred elsewhere. One could hypothesise a scenario in which anti-vaxxers are voluntary trial subjects in the standoff between immune systems and viruses, and actually heroes.

When it came to Covid-19, those caught up in travel tangles were virtually turned into criminals

Still, most of us would rather choose to be cowards and get shot, since our survival as individuals is at stake. Or let us get shot first, and ask questions about the greater good later. But contradictions, conspiracy theories and bad science are very much also the purview of governments dealing with the pandemic.

The bureaucratic and legal mess around Novak Djokovic’s Australian visa is the most high-profile case in point. And Business Day has carried some disconcerting first-person accounts of the treatment meted out to people sent into border quarantine. Whereas governments would normally aid citizens who get into trouble abroad with first-class treatment, when it came to Covid-19, those caught up in travel tangles were virtually turned into criminals — indeed, quarantine hotels are run by the same companies serving jails in some countries.

In SA, we had the case of the Limpopo doctor being quarantined in unwashed, unserviced quarters in the early days. In the Eastern Cape, reports said the police and army conducted a virtual reign of terror, and then there was the case of Collins Khoza, whose uniformed killers came out of it with little sanction.

Why are so many governments acting so high-handedly, even in the bastion of human rights, Europe, where the EU executive has actually set up an agency to monitor abuses by governments seeking to exploit the loopholes provided by states of emergency?

Some answers are being provided by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, who is regarded by many as the most creative thinker in the world today, but is little known outside Europe because his English is poor. Though he has just about trashed his reputation with early Donald Trump-like statements like Covid-19 being just another flu or that one risks one’s life by being vaccinated, his philosophy has been surprisingly prescient about the responses of states to the pandemic.

Lack of space precludes a proper introduction to his thinking, except to point to main concepts such as the state of exception, sovereignty, bared life and the camp all acquiring momentous manifestations across the world. In the state of exception, for instance, which arises when states apply disaster legislation, other law becomes suspended too. Look no further than SA’s National Coronavirus Command Council and its initially wacky edicts — by banning evictions it has allowed the occupation of dozens of sites, possibly hundreds, by squatters egged on by the EFF. This has made the parliamentary process on land restitution — the normal politics — and the rule of law rather irrelevant.

The state of exception, says Agamben, is also what removes the sovereign from the paralyses of the rule of law and bureaucracy. Our own Cyril Ramaphosa looked presidential for the first time when he began making corona speeches. However, action is not the aim. Agamben says the sovereign makes the legal status quo inoperative, and then expropriates this inoperativity as his own kingdom, so to speak. One might say Ramaphosa is a textbook case. (And add that the general laxity of ANC bureaucrats, their sense of entitlement and impunity may point to a belief that they are in a state of exception they call the national democratic revolution.)

Bare life, says Agamben, is exposed in sudden fashion during emergency situations, when people who do not fit in with the thick layer of custom, bureaucracy, institutions, consumerism and social role-playing that we call society are thrust at the sovereign’s feet, metaphorically. The inoperative sovereign leaves it to underlings, who, released from the law or ethics, more often than not respond in dehumanising ways. Think Marikana, think Life Esidimeni.

Wild contradictions arise as opportunist business pounces. And so vagrants during lockdown in the UK were suddenly housed in hotels. In Cape Town, where the central government’s dereliction of duty under the national keypoints laws should arguably see several ministers charged with treason, it has rather labelled a vagrant confused by governing party ideology a terrorist. Trying to do a Tsafendas, it wants to get the hunger-striking Zandile Mafe declared mentally unfit for trial, and neutralise his very rational message: that the state is irrational since it does not feed the homeless on the streets, but wants to force him to eat in jail.

Such people living in reduced circumstances with no political voice are collected in Agamben’s approach under the appellation Homo sacer, taken from Roman times with their hierarchical system for citizens’ rights, from the aristocratic politician down to the household slave. Any of these could be sacrificed in the service of the emperor: they would get funerary rites when they die, and their killing by ordinary citizens would be murder calling for the rites of justice. Not so for those unpeople living hidden lives as vagrants, vagabonds and banished dissidents — they could be killed with impunity and thrown into the Tiber River.

In a trilogy of works titled the Homo Sacer series, and following French philosopher Michel Foucault that kingdoms ruling over subjects have made way for democracies implementing apparatuses of control for populations, Agamben argues that not only is Homo sacer still with us, we all are candidates to be turned into homines sacri, rich or poor, citizen or illegal alien. “Sacer” originally meant “dirty” in Latin, and Nomvula Mokonyane of Aston Martin-fame indeed once raged at “dirty voters” when she tried unsuccessfully to sweet-talk them out of a service-delivery protest.

Today’s homines sacri do not get killed outright, but through inoperativity. The Life Esidimeni victims slipped through the fingers of the whole of SA society, even the media — they were only discovered by a sports writer following up an offhand remark by a friend on Facebook. We know that twice as many people die of Covid-19 outside the system, but nobody seems to have thought of taking a look at the people or lives behind these “excess” deaths, how they died, whether they were ostracised, what their relatives did, what type of funerals they had. The word “excess” reminds one of the phrase “surplus people” for those homines sacri who did not fit in with homeland schemes under the previous regime.

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Like most deep thinkers, Agamben also has his blind spots, and his obviously is science. This “impenetrable apparatus”, as he calls it, has been used to wage “medico-terror” and create more examples of bare life as the suffering elderly sick, who may want to die but are not allowed to under bans on euthanasia. He once advised fellow philosopher and close friend Jean-Luc Nancy not to have a heart transplant, but Nancy rejected it, and lived on to contribute some important concepts to Agamben’s thinking.

He has admitted his statements on Covid-19 lack proper science, but is sticking to his guns, even after Der Spiegel in Germany put him on a cover under the headline “Der Fall”, in reference to his fallen status under the waves of criticism against him. But while it would be unwise to favour philosophy over your doctor’s advice, vaccine mandates have become deeply divisive in Europe, as he has predicted. In Austria, the unvaccinated have been ordered to stay at home, even though the country is 70% vaccinated, threatening exactly what Agamben warns against: corralling citizens into minorities at the hypothetical mercy of others.

One of Agamben’s most controversial doctrines is that the unavoidable reliance on a sovereign for handling states of exception makes democracies not very different to dictatorships, especially when they repeatedly call states of emergency. In both cases, their basic building block for future politics is the camp. The homines sacri and bared life produced by the sovereign taking charge can accumulate fast, and have to be housed in large indeterminate spaces.

One of Agamben’s most controversial doctrines is that the unavoidable reliance on a sovereign for handling states of exception makes democracies not very different to dictatorships

Working this out in the 1990s, Agamben practically predicted how the war on terror would play out. He had his 15 minutes of airport fame when he refused to enter the US to take up a lucrative university post since he would be subjected to medical surveillance under 9/11 antiterror measures. Guantánamo Bay came straight out of the Agamben playbook, as a US territory chosen to house its dehumanised renditioned suspects because it fitted the prescript to “find a place on the other side of the moon”, which it is, being in legal limbo and belonging to no state.

Then came the enormous Asian refugee camps housing millions of stateless people stripped of their rights. And around that time when you told secular Syrians that within a decade they would be trudging along a Hungarian border fence by the thousand looking for a place to overnight, they would have laughed at you.

It was uncanny to watch this blueprint for history being rolled out during the pandemic too. When the Sars-CoV-2 virus emerged in Wuhan, the campaign against China’s vast camps housing Uyghur terror suspects was just starting to galvanise attention among Western governments. Lockdowns were far from anybody’s mind, but that and any democratic horror over state-instituted confinement changed with Beijing’s successful rollback of the disease when it without much ado quarantined 50-million people.

Suddenly the Chinese model was the governmental fashion across the world and the Uyghurs off the radar. SA promptly instituted a command council that could have come from a Communist Party manual in Beijing. Its members tried to regulate bare life down to what we could wear between our toes. Soldiers told parliament they only take orders from Ramaphosa, the sovereign. Fortunately, we have enough democratic checks and balances left to desist from China’s current policies, in which huge numbers of citizens are quarantined in camps in pursuit of an impossible Covid-zero policy.

So where are our camps then, you ask? Well, colonialism was in many ways one long state of emergency that relegated black people to a depoliticised, rightless, bare life in nondescript areas called “locations” or “reserves” in the 19th century. The k-word is so offensive because it really stands for the Homo sacer of the time, that dirty person content to live from hand to mouth in a hovel, the bare life of SA history on which Ramaphosa’s sovereignty is built. Homeland policies during the 1960s turned “lokasies” and slightly enlarged reserves into more liveable places, but they were still policed like the huge camps they were.

After 1994, the state spent huge amounts to try to “normalise” them. But squatter camps have only grown, and it is common cause that during the pandemic they and certain rural areas such as the Eastern Cape bore the brunt of state violence and health-service indifference — with most suburbanites barely aware of this due to the lack of proper media coverage. And in the middle of the state of disaster era, then human settlements minister Lindiwe Sisulu quietly announced that the government would no longer provide services to new “settlements”, the current euphemism for camps.

Sisulu belongs to the ANC faction that derides the rule of law and the constitution, which have been made inoperative by their shadow sovereign, Jacob Zuma. Their totalitarian mindset can be traced to the regime behind another kind of camp, in which Zuma had much sway: the penal camps in Angola. But that is a story for another day.

Meanwhile, like most other countries, we continue grappling with the unavoidable contradictions and absurdities of vaccine policies. Governments do not even hide that they are only concerned with bare life; vaccine mandates are crafted not for the sake of the citizen’s wellbeing, but to alleviate the pressure on hospitals, those institutions that in “normal times” are in constant battle with austerity policies. This is also the reason the elderly are favoured for vaccination, but what this really means is that governments are sacrificing our children to the virus — in “normal times”, though, the elderly are often treated as non-citizens.

One role for the sovereign is to resolve the clash of interests arising by making the final call, but there is the rub. The person delegated by him in SA is Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, who should have been fired after the Sarafina and Virodene scandals and never been allowed back in politics. At that time, large numbers of homines sacri died from HIV/Aids due to then president Thabo Mbeki’s emergency edicts. And the Zondo commission and the ANC’s response show that the current government can be trusted with very little too.

Anti-vaxxers may have the science dead wrong, but if their gut feel tells them to balk at bare life being inserted into their veins under guidance crafted by untrustworthy, criminally unaccountable politicians, they should at least be listened to.

• Pienaar is an author and fellow of the Johannesburg Institute of Advanced Study.