Fenêtres sur cour: living and thinking under a dome

[The conversation] - Published on May 10, 2020 in Science-Society

With the outbreak of the new coronavirus, the possibility of the end of the world as we know it - in other words, the mortality of our civilization - has left the realms of eschatology and alarmist rhetoric to take over the media, political and scientific fields.

Abdel Aouacheria, University of Montpellier

Photo by Philip Pauley, Sub-Biosphere 2 project

Any discussion of Covid-19 must now include an analysis not only of the threat (viral contamination), but also of our reactions to it, and the means we use to guard against it. What are the real limits of the fortifications that are supposed to protect us from collective disintegration? Are barrier gestures just the tip of an iceberg, a dynamic of generalized closure that contrasts with the concepts of globalization and "open society"?

The emergence of a dystopia

For weeks, part of humanity has been under house arrest (like photographer Jefferies inside his New York apartment in Rear Window by Alfred Hitchcock), on parole, oscillating between two movements: withdrawal, justified by the fear of being contaminated, and the search for refuge. But aren't these two movements part of the same, deeper-rooted process? A sort of domal syndrome? In the course of human evolution, the dome was both the house(domus) that protects, and the roof(doma), the rampart placed above oneself, masking the sky. Now, it's a veritable amputecture: the dome protects but deprives its resident of any horizon, confining him spatially and depriving him of landmarks. The dome functions like a biological membrane, according to Simondon 's definition: polarized (interfacing an interior and an exterior) and selective (ensuring that "the living is alive at every moment").

When the dome turns against humans

Of course, before SARS-CoV-2, the syndrome was already palpable, but it only had the features of an endemic disease. Just think of the Beijing International School and its shelters to keep children from suffocating, the survivalist bunkers or the plant and seed vaults of theEden Project and the Svalbard Seed Vault. Or the walls that isolate countries from each other (Israel from Palestine, the USA from Mexico, etc.).

Seeking to isolate oneself from others, whatever the scale, was still no more than the logic of nimbies, i.e. the self-defensive posture of owners seeking to preserve their interests, as described by Mike Davis in City of Quartz. But what can you do against an invisible enemy that can affect anyone?

What the dome brings into play

In the face of the virus, the dome behaves like an immune system. With Covid-19, defending interests has become defending the social body at all costs. As in the post-apocalyptic film Logan's Run(Crystal Age, 1976), which shows a reclusive society in bubble cities, protection by the dome comes at a high price.

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x9cajc

The price to pay is a logic of reclusion: the dome must become as hermetic as possible. Its purpose is to control the masses in order to perpetuate the whole. In Europe, we quickly witnessed the closure of the Schengen area and the introduction of controls on the movement of goods and people.

To limit the spread of the pathogen, symbolic or miniature domes are deployed, ranging from the virus to the clan (parents, children, friends), via the establishment of hospital sectors with high and low viral densities, sorting zones and social distancing (considered synonymous with physical distancing). Decontamination à la carte is itself a dome program, based on statistical management of deaths and compliance with standards (including in green zones).

A confusing cacophony

By acting on behaviors and living environments, the health crisis provides a case in point for Foucauldi's theory of biopolitics, giving concrete form to the dystopia of The Crystal Age. In this film, a computer governs the life and death of humans, who have become ignorant of the outside world (which they have made unhealthy) and of the very reasons for their confinement in domes.

However, governmentality through the dome is struggling to find expression in current circumstances: confusion reigns over the availability and usefulness of masks and tests, the legitimacy of treatments (eg: chloroquine), on political decisions (scientific advice, the role of the expert, the media) and by the existence of contradictory injunctions placing the citizen in a situation of paradoxical constraint (e.g. putting children in school but not going to restaurants; promoting telecommuting while being wary of videoconferencing tools like Zoom).

These muddles, which affect both discourse (sometimes reassuring, sometimes worrying) and therapeutic practices (with the suspicion of collusion with private interests) and prevention (with the omission of the precautionary principle embodied in the health reserve), scuttle the effects of the normalization of conduct attempted by those in power. The latter seeks salvation in technology, with the tracking of patients and their contacts. In The Crystal Age, citizens wear a connected crystal in the palm of their hand for the rest of their lives, like a kind of electronic bracelet.

The State is thus opening a liberticidal Pandora's box, under the probable control of GAFAM, while investing both space (through the use of drones) and cyberspace (with the ubiquitous hashtag #Restezchezvous, reminiscent of the propaganda described in the novel 1984 or the film THX 1138).

Architectural domes reflect cognitive and socio-cultural domes

As a result of Covid-19's mismanagement, public confidence is undermined, and mistrust, denunciation (in Eugène Zamiatine's Nous autres, glass buildings are used to spy on and subordinate recalcitrants) and conspiracy theories on social networks are encouraged. Here too, the metaphor of the dome is used to describe digital echo chambers, whose filter bubbles isolate Internet users from ideas that differ from their own, in order to reinforce their own beliefs.

The dome encloses us.
AdobeStock, Author provided

Domes aren't just exterior, they're also interior. Cracking them is risky. By challenging our certainties and conditioning, the crisis reinforces our anxiety about the limits of a (neoliberal) model that is incapable of compensating for the decline of the great ideologies, but which is already looking ahead to the day after, or even the day after tomorrow (cf. theinterview with military historian Pierre Razoux).

Towards a more united humanity?

A pandemic, because it corresponds to the occurrence of an unforeseen event, accelerates the construction of citadels, both inside and outside ourselves, revealing the stigmata of civilizational apoptosis (apoptosis being the process whereby a cell, isolated from the rest, destroys itself).