Space and Culture: Quarantine

Global Quarantine

The dead, not unlike the sick, are historically quarantined from the space of the living. Spatial separation is constituent of civilization and this is epitomized by an architectural and urban separation, indeed division, between the space of the dead and the space of the living. Cemeteries are historically located on the periphery, quartered off by a clearly demarcated boundary, or in a separate site altogether as it is called, the City of the Dead. Architecture manifests a clarity of distinction between the living and the dead as spatially distinct building block of civilization.

Yet we know this cannot be the whole story. We know this because death, if not the dead, intervenes in life, not only frequently but as an undercurrent and momentum. We also know this ambiguity of distinction between the dead and the living through considering the spatial manifestations accommodating the sick. A host of architectural typologies historically outline the quarantine of the sick—hospitals, field hospitals, sanitariums, hospices, and sanitaire halls—and these serve as spaces of care for the vulnerable against the possible risk the living, inhabiting the general space of the city and country, poses to them. These “holding spaces” of the sick confront and challenge the clarity of architecture’s distinction between the City of the Dead and the City of the Living. For while the line between the living and the dead is final and permanent, the ambiguity of this division is heightened by the experience of the seriously sick and our perception of their state as hovering between life and death or the transition/exchange between being alive or at rest/dead. A global risk to the health of the living accentuates the uncertainty and ambivalence between life and death.

This is a significant ambivalence, and here I want to draw on the death drive in psychoanalytic theory to explore its role in an architecture of quarantine. In part, this exploration is framed through the material and metaphoric distinction between the solidity/impermeability of the tomb and the spaciousness/porosity of an architecture for the living, and how this framing can position the architectural configurations that are prominent in the current pandemic situation. One is an architecture of vacancy resulting from the regulations of “stay@home,” social distancing, and separation. In normative histories, the logic of quarantine is the spatial segregation of some to enable the socio-spatial normativity of the many. Regulations enforcing the isolation of the many have created large empty spaces—in the cities, in the streets, at metro or railway stations, in airports, in arts and cultural centers, and museums and libraries; the boarding of cafes, bars, and restaurants gives this a more abandoned atmosphere. The closure of small-scale communal and neighborhood spaces—neighborhood houses, local libraries, local retail, centers for elderly peoples—means an intricate urban grain is dissolved—none less than the destruction of the social bond. Does the current vacuity of the urban, suburban, communal neighborhood, and its resulting destruction of the social bond, invert the logic of quarantine? Or does it take the logic of quarantine to its logical end—as the incremental isolation, division, and segregation of people during “normative periods” that will tend towards vacated public and communal spaces.

This conceptualization of an architecture of vacancy is only relevant for those geopolitical regions and those enclaves within geopolitical regions in which an architectural infrastructure has facilitated the feasibility and viability of the “stay@home” or “working from home” directive. What is the architecture that absorbs those populations that cannot go home, have no home, and/or cannot work from home?

In Singapore “Migrant workers live in fear following a surge of COVID-19 infections in cramped and filthy dormitories, making social distancing impossible,” anywhere from 8 to 20 men share a room; “Singapore’s largest cluster, the S11 Dormitory in Punggol, houses some 13,000 workers and has 586 cases. There are 43 foreign worker dormitories in the city-state, where some 200,000 low-wage work-permit holders mostly from South Asia reside” (Bowie, 2020). The Singapore government response is: “More than 5,000 workers have reportedly been moved to temporary accommodation, including vacant public housing flats, multi-storey car parks, military barracks and offshore floating lodgings used in the marine and offshore industry, in an effort to reduce high-risk population density in the dormitories”(Business & Human Rights Resource Centre, 2020a). In contrast, the Qatar authorities “rounded up and expelled dozens of migrant workers after telling them they were being taken to be tested for COVID-19. . .they were taken to detention centres and held in appalling conditions for several days, before being sent to Nepal” (Business & Human Rights Resource Centre, 2020b). The Qatar government denied these actions stating that repatriated migrant workers were found to have been “engaged in illegal and illicit activity.” Containment and expulsion of unprivileged migrant workers are two sides of the same coin and are linked to the ordinarily destitute and homeless in places like New York. All share a spatial illegitimacy, a lack of spatial agency or subjectivity, a lack of entitlement to occupy space.

And yet much praise was voiced towards a “cluster containment strategy” empowered by the use of mobile phones, data analytics, and drones in addition to traditional patrolling methods to survey crowded places (Srivastav, 2020). Cities, railway stations and urban centers are spatially vacated but digitally surveilled and monitored, simultaneously with the surveillance of the mobility of human subjects. Is this architecture of repression/compression/containment also an inverse to quarantine, or a determination to its excessive dimension? Has the pandemic confronted/challenged the very “civil” structure of quarantine to expose the problem of its excessive logic? Journalists have noted that the rise of fear, panic, and uncertainty is seen by many governments as opportunity to clamp down and put in practice brutal policies and practices.

In this environment, private-owned and detached domestic architecture escalates as a privileged form of housing. But artist Rachel Whiteread’s sculpture House most strikingly helps us understand the death drive in architecture. Whiteread worked from the interior of the house—casting impressions of the walls using concrete. Once home to Mr Sidney Gale, evicted due to a development strategy that required the houses on that block to be demolished, it was the last remaining house also due for demolition. The cast concrete walls of the interior were supported by an infrastructure of metal scaffolding so that when the exterior envelope was removed (piece by piece, brick by brick) what remained standing in its place was a hardened concrete mass. This inside-the-space-of-the-house was inverted into a solid block life-size artefact. A solid and dense mass no longer resembles a home or house, but a home-tomb, a solid block that is the inverse of the space of inhabitation. Whiteread’s solidifying sculptures resemble the sarcophagi of pharaohs and the solidified human figures of Pompeii eternally uncanny in their everyday gesture, or worse, the terrifying modern mafia ritual of burying a person in fluid concrete that will engulf every porous membrane and then solidify into a hard artefact—it is not a house or a home, but a corpse.

In his discussion on architecture and the death drive, Holm, referring to Freud and Lacan, outlines “The concept of the drive re-evaluates the seemingly simple opposition between life and death. It repositions the line of division from life/death to subject/non-subject” (Holm, 2007, p. 53). Whiteread’s house is unoccupiable because it is opaque; it has no space inside and its previous permeability, the architectural membrane of fenestration, doors, vents, curtains that imparts exchange between the inside and outside, were blocked. This disappearance of the permeability and spaciousness of architecture is what Holm’s argues as the departure of death, “When you die, it is not life that leaves you, but death that leaves you. Death is the empty space that makes subjectivity possible, and when this emptiness leaves the subject, it leaves a solid body, a body without subjectivity” (Holm, 2007, p. 40). I understand this rather odd sounding idea about death as the “last breath” or the ritual of “closing the eyelids” at the moment of dying. Last year, we watched the last breath leave our father. His eyes had closed and there was none of the inter-subjective passage; for two days he could hear and squeezed our hand. But then his cheeks hollowed out and he became unrecognizable. Death is the breath that leaves the subject, death is the disappearance of intersubjective affirmation of seeing or hearing one another, and death is the departure of the porosity of the human subject.

Holm’s summary of the drive theory refers to Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents, “civilization, of which architecture is a material constituent, is a defence against our most fundamental instincts and drives; in particular, the death drive”(Holm, 2007, p. 32). This civilizing role of architecture is also picked up by Mark Wigley, who described architecture as a functional marriage rather than an erotic lover affair. Like Freud, who looked around in 1930 and saw “an awful lot of death, destruction and the dissemination of lies and hatred” (Holm, 2007, p. 32) in the current pandemic environment every ordinary person is confronted by death, severe illness and heightened risk. Instead of Freud’s 1930s “lies and hatred”, the current escalation of control and compliance for the good of our health and in the name of survival and civilization accommodates the dissemination of imagery of the cruel treatment of people. Doctors have hinted at the parallel with war stating that calculations of how many and who you are willing to forsake is integral to this picture. This is the death drive at the surface of humanity. The death drive is destructiveness, whether this be directed, accidental or inevitable destruction, and it “unravels” the picture of normative lifestyle. Psychoanalytic theory considers the death drive in two ways—first as a subject’s agenda to death, killing, and suicide. Killing (or suicide) may not be a direct agenda but a consequence of the lifestyle lead in the pursuit of happiness; in psychoanalysis (as Holm reminds us) the subject is responsible for all their actions and thoughts. ¹ And second as an undercurrent to all human endeavors as a return of the human subject to a state of relaxation and rest; to “rest in peace” as the motto goes.

Yet the most important capacity of the death drive is less related to the biological life of the subject than to human subjectivity itself. This is why psychoanalytic theorist Slavoj Žižek constructs a very radical stance towards human rights. In The Parallax View, Žižek (2006, p. 340) argues that a refugee is a human deprived of a socio-political identity and stripped of the basis of citizenship, and yet it is in this state of non-subjectivity that such a human is offered protection under universal human rights. The problem with this logic, Žižek proposes is that when humans are reduced to a stateless state, excluded from the political community, they are precisely humans that have no rights. As evident in the pandemic media—millions of migrant workers—are treated as inhuman. From this perspective Žižek criticizes a discourse of humanitarian interventionism because it maintains, and perhaps preserves, the depoliticization and necessary denial of any political subjectivization to the victimized other. Predominant western discourse as the right to intervene can be understood “as a sort of ‘return to sender’: the disused rights that had been send [sic] to the rightless are sent back to the senders” (Ranciere as cited in Žižek, 2006, p. 341). Human rights humanism thus “covers up this monstrosity of the ‘human as such’, presenting it as a sublime human essence” (Žižek, 2006, p. 342). The death drive giving rise to and constituent of the architecture of compression is that of the non-subject, the subject stripped off their socio-political identity and citizenship, the subject that hovers between the living and the dead. The architecture of compression is precisely the materialization of the inhuman core of the death drive, exposing the very horror of human subjectivity. Entangled with it is the desire that created a system that not only allows the allocation of humans to that state of statelessness but that wants and needs their statelessness in order to grow economically and progress politically/ to live their own lives of normativity and desires. The architecture of vacancy and compression overlap and are intertwined.

The virus merely exposed this architecture of compression. Such forced quarantine proliferates in the interstitial spaces of global economies. Migrant labor workers are stripped of all socio-political identity and citizenship, and in this sense, they are “symbolically dead while biologically alive (those who are excluded from sociosymbolic order)” (Žižek, 2006, p. 342). Only their physically able bodies are needed to service global capitalism as forsaken subjects that will perform the most destructive, risky, arduous jobs—minus the protective measures of the state. By taking away their work, the pandemic uncovered the layer of the death drive—of destruction and killing—of the war machine integral to non-COVID-19 periods. While the directive to repatriate migrant workers exposes the death drive—probably killing them along the way, the decision to keep them alive in the dormitories, feeding them and so on merely masks the same attitude—preserving their non-subjectivity— and therefore their availability to serve. Elsewhere, Žižek has discussed a rise of a new slavery, not a direct legal status of enslaved persons, but a new global slavery that acquires a multitude of new forms.

Quarantine as the self-isolation of the “stay@home” directive and its residual emptiness of the cities is a destructiveness of the permeability that engenders the social bond constituent of human civilization. It is the death drive of the neo-liberal subject and of the systemic, masked erosion of social space and its possibility of inter-subjectivity. While the archaic notion of “divide and rule” is well known, digital connectedness presents a convincing substitute to physical and spatial separation, enthusiastically promoted by advanced subjects. Against this surrender to a digitalized and domestic containment of social space, it was the appearance of people in Italy (and Spain) on the balconies of their apartment housing blocks to sing or play instruments in solidarity that created a pause/interval of the death drive and its architecture of vacancy (Thorpe, 2020). By intercepting the spatial void—the empty piazza, square, or court of their neighborhood—the theatrics of their intersubjective bonding altered the emptiness to a space of possibility. Their appearance on the balconies and their voice rising to song recalibrated the space-time co-ordinates of quarantine.

Quarantine is understood as spatial division, but is also etymologically linked to time, from the mid seventeenth-century Italian term of quarantine and quaranta giorni—the 40 days of isolation that ships spent at port to avoid spreading disease into the city. Forty days is associated with Orthodox Christian rituals including days of fasting and the 40 days of a human subject’s existence considered to be precarious at birth and at death. Quarantine can also serve as a temporary period of withdrawal from the voracious economies of twenty-first-century desire. The image of the “global” is often presented by a map of the world with trillions of lines crisscrossing it, and most intensive at the points of a heightened global economy. However, as I have said elsewhere, the one major incapacity of the global is the borders confronting those invisible global workers, those very people that are residual to state-regulated economies seeking livelihoods within the global economy. Quaranta as 40 days, as a defined time, is a reminder that quarantine has to have a temporal end/a closure. To entangle the holding of non-criminal and non-citizen people in quarantine—detention or in a state of statelessness—whether this be the dormitories of migrant labor, the exposed cities of the homeless, the closed houses of the widow—without this quaranta is to enforce their absolute exclusion from the socio-symbolic world, and thereby to subject them to a slow death, to an erosion of their human subjectivity. Quaranta as measure of time anticipates the permeability required for an architecture that is not determined by the death drive.