Pakistan fights terror like Europe fought the plague
“Everyone locked up in his cage, everyone at his window, answering to his name and showing himself when asked – it is the great review of the living and the dead,” social theorist Michel Foucault says of a 17th century European surveillance system to deal with the plague. In two words: “permanent registration”.
Cities of Pakistan deal with an invisible enemy too. They are partitioned with checkpoints, barriers, barbed wire and concrete slabs. If you move between spaces, you are stopped and made to roll down your car window and prove your identity – with a ‘computerised’ card that links you to a permanent database of all citizens of the country.
Europe fought plague with ‘order’. In his book ‘Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison’, Foucault compares the European response to plague with that to leprosy: the response to leprosy was separation, but that to the plague was segmentation. Leprosy is a visible disorder and can be removed. Plague is invisible. The boundary between order and disorder is blurred, and therefore every individual needs to be observed.
That order, says Foucault, “invents new mechanisms; it separates, it immobilises, it partitions; it constructs for a time what is both a counter-city and the perfect society; it imposes an ideal functioning, but one that is refused, in the final analysis, like the evil that is combats, to a simple dualism of life and death”.
Life in Lahore reminds me of the 1931 German movie ‘M’. The film, directed by Fritz Lang, is about the reactions of police and people to a series of child murders. M shows that in the time that it was produced, expanding European cities were becoming progressively hard to govern. The murderer could disappear in the crowd and the only way to find him was to segment and completely survey the crowd, and then mobilise it.
Foucault speaks of “strict spatial partitioning” that was part of the response to the 17th century plague. “Each street is placed under the authority of a syndic, who keeps it under surveillance… Inspection functions ceaselessly. The gaze is alert everywhere.”
German film and media critic Anton Kaes called M “a portrayal of the inherent relation between urban living and danger” which is “made all the more terrifying by the anonymity and disintegration of the city’s social space.”
The 20th century experience was of “growing incursion of danger into human life”, according to Earnst Junger, a German novelist who wrote about his experiences in and after the First World War. New technology was developed to be able to see this danger and capture it for total observation and total control. “Being able to freeze it in a photo had a therapeutic effect.” he said. During World War I “visibility became a matter of life and death”.
“We are approaching a state of affairs in which each person needs to be made aware within minutes of a news report, a warning, a threat. Hidden behind the face of entertainment promoted by the all-encompassing media, are special forms of discipline,” Junger said.
Kaes sees in M “the city in the state of total mobilisation prepared to fight the enemy”, and therefore calls it a war movie. “Both the underworld and the police are determined to wage an all-out war in which every resource is activated and differences in class and social status are disregarded”.
In M, “neighbours watch each other; parents discipline their children to be wary; and even innocent bystanders are seen as potential suspects. Newspapers and extra editions keep everyone up-to-date at all times”.
“The mobilisation produces a dense surveillance network aimed at making visible what has inexplicably evaded the tightly woven web on controls already in place,” says Kaes. “Criminals and vagrants have identity papers, they are registered and monitored, their fingerprints are recorded. Asylums and hospitals keep records of their patients and their medical histories. Telephone lines link the population to the authorities, and office buildings have alarm systems directly connected to the police headquarters. Plainclothes detectives control the street, searching in widening circles for every possible clue”.
This seems remarkably similar to the goals Pakistan wants to achieve with the NADRA and its database.
The murderer in the movie M is eventually captured by the police and tried. But “this will not bring our children back”, mothers of the murdered children say. “One has to keep closer watch over the children.”
The solution to the problems of surveillance, then, is only more surveillance?
The writer is a media and culture critic and works at The Friday Times. He tweets @paagalinsaan and gets email at harris@nyu.edu