Body Politics in the SARS Crisis

During the SARS crisis, problems of the body were stripped bare. They became the indisputable center of the entire crisis, and according to people within this crisis, all problems were far overshadowed by those of the body. People no longer distinguished groups on the basis of their ideological standpoints, their beliefs, their economic level, or their social status. An unstable social contract, power struggles both overt and veiled, conflicts, disputes, and contests of strength in relation to ideology or economic interest—all these colorful and manifold cultural issues, all these everyday social dramas—gave way to deep-seated perceptions of the body. People ripped off their social masks to reveal their Hobbesian instinct for self-preservation. At this time humanity in its defiance of death reverted to a primitive condition, discarding its sociality without a second thought. Ideals, work, ambition, not to mention money—these centers and motivators of the ordinary condition of life completely collapsed. System, orderliness, and organizations dissolved of their own accord, actively forfeiting their effectiveness.

This is a moment that induces suffocation, but at the same time it is a moment without historical precedent—humans, not only individuals, but also the entire structure of the human population, have undergone a great psychological shock. This shock is not only a fear of death, it is also the rare plight of feeling completely unmoored. Daily life has suddenly been swung off its tracks; the entire daily human experience has suddenly become rigid, dull, brought to a standstill. This is an exceptional experience with the terrifying quality of a nightmare. Humans, possibly for the first time on such a large scale, have left behind society, the other, the crowds that form a background on the street, and their own location in a public domain. Humans, possibly for the first time in such a thoroughgoing way, have retreated into themselves, into their own bodies, into their own loneliness, into their own helplessness. Humans, perhaps for the first time, have placed themselves into a kind of surreality, have located themselves in a fiction film, have cast themselves in a drama on a stage. Sociality has rapidly devolved into individuality.

During the SARS crisis the family became a self-sufficient closed field, the absolute space of the individual. The family took a discrete, closed space to express its complete meaning; it took on the meaning of the house itself. The family is now only an unadulterated space in which one can quarantine oneself and one's viruses. It has become the protective outer wall of the body. Because of this, the function of space has overwhelmingly squeezed out the style of space. Geometry expels ethics. People hiding in their homes are not renovating attenuated blood ties and intimate relations; rather they are subjecting this geometrical space to a tirelessly patient inspection. The family became an object for the disciplines of hygiene and geometry, and perhaps for the first time, various specific areas of household space, especially those places that have a close connection to the body—toilets, windows, doorknobs, shoe racks—were made subject to a detailed attention. People's gazes patiently probed every hidden nook in this space. Family members who retreated from society—never mind what status they once occupied there—all spontaneously joined in becoming diligent and conscientious cleaning workers. This was true for both the cleanliness of the space and the cleanliness of one's own body: people never tired of assiduously scrubbing their own hands. The joint cleansing of the body and of space became the most necessary and most daily form of labor. The great poetics of the family was destroyed by the unbearably tedious work of cleaning.

Bourdieu's concept of an agonistic field has lost its theoretical force. That is to say, the game of every field of struggle for capital has spontaneously dissolved. What stands in for the field is the strictly spatial area of the imprisoned body. Classic sociological models are unable to describe the landscape of this moment. What is needed is an antisociological account, an...