COVID-19 as Atmospheric Dis-ease: Attuning into Ordinary Effects of Collective Quarantine and Isolation

This is a quarantine diary. Forty days of reflections on collective self-isolation. Notes on attunements into atmospheric dis-ease. Forty entries, growing mathematically every passing day, like a curve, eventually flattening, then fading.

It was March 17, 2020, when everything changed. Insulation is ordinary on a small island. Isolation isn’t. Vancouver Island, the mainland, the world, are now a threat.

The Federal and Provincial Governments begin tracking new cases. New deaths are presented at daily briefings. We are asked to flatten the curve. We are told to cover our faces, to cleanse our hands, and to quarantine ourselves within our cocoons. The Other now embodies sickness.

March 19. Vancouverites are publicly shamed on news media for failing to practice physical distance. Local doctors ask us to keep two meters between us, “about the length of a kayak paddle.”

British Columbia (BC) issues a new 50-person limit on the maximum size of public gatherings. A “closed” sign now hangs on every window. Non-residents are asked to stay away from our island.

I walk by the waterfront, in the middle of the road. No car passes. No seaplane flies. No friend or acquaintance shakes hands. The quarantine has now bled inside the body public. Disease is a sickness, an ailment disrupting a human, animal, or plant body. Dis-ease is different. Dis-ease is an infection affecting a body public, a social malaise, a rupture, and a loss of ease and of comfort.

The quarantine is a pause, an event that affords us the possibility to write theory through reflexive story. A story with distant characters and a sole protagonist—the embodied self striving to keep the presumptive sick Other at least one kayak paddle away.

The quarantine is a geography of what doesn’t happen: of canceled events, of missed chances, of a shuttered consumer society, of shattered kinship. For everything which quarantine and self-isolation shut down, they open up new atmospheres: atmospheres of dis-ease. Dis-ease is discomfort, anxiety, suspicion, and fear of the unknown, of contamination, of the Other. Dis-ease is cessation of the normal, suspension of habit and ritual, all in the name of preventing disease.

Kathleen Stewart (2011, p. 445) writes that everyday life consists of “the enigmas and oblique events and background noises that might be barely sensed and yet are compelling.” These enigmas, events, and noises are now suspended until further notice. This is dis-ease too. In atmospheres of dis-ease, all spaces become uninhabited, blocked off with “caution!” tape. Social existence flattens under the overbearing weight of dis-ease.

In atmospheric dis-ease, the future becomes a speculation, the present an experimentation. Sickness and death throw themselves together as an ordinary effect “in a moment as an event and as a sensation” (Stewart, 2007, p. 1). By Day 10, quarantine and self-isolation become a totalizing system. Under the guise of preventing disease, the state now becomes the maker of dis-ease.

Ordinary effects are “assemblages of practices and practical knowledges,” writes Stewart (2007, pp. 1–2), “the varied, surging capacities to affect and be affected that give everyday life the quality of a continual motion of relations, scenes, contingencies, and emergencies.” Atmospheric dis-ease is both an ordinary effect and an extraordinary one.

Seven o’clock. People on our island begin banging pots to invisible distant health workers. Our homes are in the woods. No one can hear us. Our loud bangs echo with a sinister tone through the forest.

Ordinary effects, Stewart (2007, p. 2) argues,

happen in impulses, sensations, expectations, daydreams, encounters, and habits of relating, in strategies and their failures, in forms of persuasion, contagion, and compulsion, in modes of attention, attachwment and agency, and in publics and social worlds of all kinds that catch people up in something that feels like something.

Dis-ease is an ordinary effect. It happens in the impulse to not touch anything anymore, in an ordinary chill that feels like a cold might be coming, in the expectation that more deaths will be counted, in daydreams that next month a jet might once again cross the sky. Dis-ease is in encountering a friend and turning away; it’s in the contagion of a virus oozing through a community; it’s in lockdown compulsions; it’s in campaigns of mass persuasion to mask our faces. It’s in modes of attention: manic, obsessive, compulsive modes of haptic attention to everything that our bodies feel and touch.

Atmospheres are lived affects permeating a place with diffused rhythms, shared sensations, contagious moods, and common orientations. They are little worlds, partly real and partly imagined. Plastic and yet durable, ordinary, and yet extraordinary. Sometimes elusive, and sometimes clearly marked on the ground by red lines delineating relations between bodies in space queued up behind tills.

Quarantine forces attunement into atmospheric dis-ease. Quarantine compels us to take notice of the charged spaces of our new normal. New cases, new hospitalizations, new deaths, and new pockets of disease. Every day, new numbers, new spectral fears, and new hauntings hidden somewhere else, revealing themselves somewhere else. We watch, we count, and we wait.

Another playground closes.

Disease is distant from here. This isn’t Lombardy or New York City. Yet dis-ease hangs thick in the air, like droplets suspended from someone speaking moistly. Dis-ease is rolled and folded in every package of overbought toilet paper. Dis-ease is baked into every roll of home-made bread. Dis-ease is charged in every electron connecting ZOOM chat rooms. Dis-ease is administered through every drive-through window, every wiped-down shopping cart, and every touchless credit card tap. Dis-ease comes down on us with every curve projection, every financial market collapse, and every unemployed man and woman handing a dis-eased resume at a grocery store.

And then someone else gets sick.

And then someone else dies.

I decided that if I could only take one author with me to this self-quarantined island that would be Kathleen Stewart. In the “New Ordinary,” she and Berlant write how “things land on you, ending up in a facial tic or passing fast, a one-time only smirk” (2019). In the new ordinary, “you find yourself suspended in a partially compelling form of eye contact, or a tendency to warm up to strangers that only goes so far” (2019). In the new ordinary moment of collective dis-ease, everyone is suspect.

Distant images of faraway cities show landscapes of empty highways, of sparse air passengers retrieving their luggage at carousels while dressed like clumsy astronauts. Deer and goats reclaim city streets. But here, life on this small island unfolds through different rhythms. A billboard by the elementary school simply says, “We miss you.” A man pulls up by the grocery store in a beat-up truck, rolls his window down, and begins to play guitar to entertain those lining up outside. Dis-ease can be tense and haunting as well as dripping in melancholia for a world, a way of life that never seemed so special and that nothing feels like something after all. Dis-ease angers and saddens you at the same time: anxiety, frustration, and melancholia wrapped in a shroud only apt for mourning.

Twenty-three days into collective quarantine. Another press-conference. A new epicenter. More reminders that a 40-day penitence simply won’t be enough because we can’t let our guards down. Collective isolation takes on a new feeling, it’s as though we’re not just isolated from one another in space but in time also. With every passing day, the dis-ease spreads farther, now overtaking our immediate future. South of the border, bodies in bags are now stored in freezer trucks. Sports fields become field hospitals. Conference centers are turned into morgues. Mass graves emerge. Here, on this small island, the quiet is quieter than usual.

“Imagine the lived effects of such a nervous system of signs and agencies,” wrote Stewart in 2007 (p. 56): “the sense of being at home in a place caught between a rock and a hard place—at once protected from a threatening outside world and smothering in the excesses of reaction and fabulation.” Attune into the sense of groping along, in the midst of a minefield of menaces, of failed collective solutions, of decaying bodies. Find yourself checking websites to track the inexorable growth of hopelessness. Imagine a collective body located no longer in the prospect of capitalist growth but of centralized state control. Imagine a global system built on the dream of mobility and now designed to contain you and your presumptive sickness. Imagine yourself dieting on a hundred-mile diet of dis-ease.

An atmosphere is a field of forces. It is a place and a moment in which people get caught. An atmosphere is an attunement to something evolving, shifting, and yet for the moment stable, heavy, compelling. Twenty-five days ago, I could still escape atmospheric dis-ease in the bush. Now it’s pervasive. Now it’s in every essential service still available, in every school and university announcement, it’s in the fabric of every industry called upon to keep us going, to keep the dis-ease going. The intensities of all the little worlds we live in have now coalesced into a clearing of all spaces to make way for the progress of dis-ease.

There is something unique about self- and collective isolation on an island, a small island of 4,000 people. In the city, it’s easier to treat the Other, most likely a stranger, as a potentially diseased body. In a small and isolated community, it’s not as easy. Here, the Other is likely a friend, an acquaintance, or the parent of one of your child’s friends. It’s someone you know. And if someone you know is potentially sick, so are you. Quarantine may keep foreign disease at bay on a small island but it accelerates the spread of dis-ease, it forces it to permeate the threshold of your body, it brings sickness inside your skin. “Places on the side of the road,” observes Stewart (2007, p. 37), “stand as icons of things that happen and the people they happen to.” On a small island, on a space by the side of the road, atmospheric dis-ease intensifies every scene with vulnerability, suspicion, and anxiety.

No new deaths, no new cases. It’s Sunday. In BC, no one counts death and disease on Sundays.

We are told not to pay too much attention to daily stats on new cases and new deaths. As if we could be so cavalier to not look at the curve every day. A curve and its stats on dis-ease, like an ordinary effect, are “erratic,” “obtuse,” and work “not through meanings per se, but rather in the way they pick up density and texture as they move through bodies, dreams, dramas, and social worldlings of all kinds” (Stewart, 2007, p. 452).

Atmospheric dis-ease is a tangle of potential connections and disconnections. Whoever gets sick has their social networks and movements traced, tracked, tested, and put on warning. And ultimately isolated even further. Moments of atmospheric dis-ease, the traces they leave onto bodies “surge or become submerged,” “they point to the jump of something coming together for a minute and to the spreading lines of resonance and connection that become possible” (Stewart, 2011, p. 3).

Canadians email CBC their questions. Disease control experts answer their questions on The National. “Can I pet other people’s dogs?” “How long does the virus cling to the air?” “How do I turn off the tap after washing my hands, since I touched it with my contaminated fingers?” Dis-ease gets re-imagined with every question, fueled again in newly imagined ways. The present becomes re-envisioned through the lens of potential past and future contamination, continuous, surprising, and ever invasive. Dis-ease transforms itself from the potential of death to an imminent vitalist force with the power to re-engineer itself and inventively transmit itself to more forms of life.

Spring has arrived. Cherry blossoms and wild daisies awake from months of hibernation as dis-ease stains their scents in the air. Hummingbirds whir in the suddenly blue skies muted from the droning noise of grounded seaplanes. Westerly winds pick up, carrying the acrid smell of the Nanaimo mill cranking out pulp to make N-95 masks for 3M.

Every attunement to atmospheric dis-ease picks up a new scent. The air is already heavy with fatigue, with depression, with isolation, with the anxiety over job loss, and with the fear of domestic abuse. With every new attunement, dis-ease becomes a more intense form of inhabitation of our lifeworld, a thicker texture, a more enveloping atmosphere that saturates all ways in which we live now. Everyone now signs their emails with “Stay Healthy.” Provinces and states force us to believe “we’re in it together.” Nationalistic bullshit like “Canada strong” makes its way onto bumper stickers. No longer is this atmosphere a background hum, a momentary scene; it is now “the new normal.”

BC announces that all its provincial parks are now closed.

A woman and her children see me approaching on a trail. She stops. Fails to smile. She pulls her children close to her and drags them deep into the salal bush to let me pass. I mumble “hello,” but I mean “fuck you.” She mumbles “hello,” but she means “fuck off.”

On a small island, in a community where nearly everyone knows everyone else, social distancing is offensive. I’d have no trouble being treated like a stranger by a stranger. But it hurts to be treated like a stranger by someone who isn’t. Dis-ease fractures relations, it burdens the air of an encounter, it pushes you to self-isolate to simply avoid, to shirk the reminders that maybe you are sick too.

Atmospheres can “feel like something you’re in, or sort of, or just something you’re around” (Stewart 2011, p. 452). Atmospheric dis-ease feels something that is inside you. They say you might have the virus and not know it. But you do know the dis-ease has bled within you.

“Ordinary affects are an animate circuit that conducts force and maps connections, routes, and disjunctures,” writes Stewart (2007, p. 3). The ordinary effects of this virus, its moments of atmospheric dis-ease are a “contact zone” (Stewart, 2007, p. 3) closed off with yellow tape and physical distance warning. And yet, two meters away, they are still felt.

When will the peak of the virus take place? No one knows. But atmospheric dis-ease has already peaked. It peaked the moment hope drowned in memories of what ordinary life once was.

This morning I woke up not knowing what day of the week it was. I got out of bed and wondered how one should dress for a world engulfed in atmospheric dis-ease. I chose pajama pants.

Forty days have passed. Dis-ease still clings to the air. This has felt futile.