The senses, fear, and COVID-19: How have our interactions with the world changed?
How do you acknowledge a fear of something that you cannot see, feel, or fight? Like a fear of the dark, COVID-19 is breeding terror amongst us like scared children at their first sleepover.
It’s undeniable that the global crisis of COVID-19 is bringing out a number of issues most people have never experienced in their lives before. Enforced lockdown, limited food supplies, restricted movement and the removal of jobs and social lives all sound reminiscent of a wartime era and sit jarringly alongside modern (particularly Western) lifestyles. People are struggling with this massive shock and naturally it’s bringing out both the best and worst of society.
Being told what you can and cannot do is something most people struggle with. An article on the difference between ‘I don’t want to’ and ‘You can’t’ highlights how much intention and language can affect how people understand, receive and act on a message. This intrigued me into thinking about how we, as humans, interact with the world around us and how COVID-19 has changed almost all of our daily actions at a fundamental level.
There are several key ways in which we interact with the world: physically, emotionally, socially, and culturally.
Defined by the 5 senses (sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell) — our literal gateway to understanding the world.
Our attachments and personal perceptions to the environment and objects around us, either as individuals or as groups.
How we perceive and know how to behave within the world around us (social norms and expectations).
Interactions with the world as defined and influenced by our upbringing and other relevant cultural factors such as race, ethnicity, religion, and class.
All of these interactions have been affected by the COVID-19 outbreak and while some are easier to understand and see the effect of, it is undoubtedly the longer-term effects, the more ‘unseen’ factors that will leave the deepest scars on our collective memory.
The Physical Divide
We all know the 5 senses, we learn them in school and we use them every single day. Although most of us may automatically think of sight and sound as the two senses we use most to interact with the world, touch is by the far the one that plays the biggest role in our understanding and interactions. Take this scenario for example:
You are walking through a market in the summer. You can smell homemade bread and strawberries in the air, hear people chatting and haggling over prices and produce. You decide to buy some fresh peaches. They look delicious, a lush shade of orange and pink, just fuzzy enough and the size of your palm. They are bundled neatly in trays and the stallholder gladly packs a tray up for you and hands it to you in exchange for money. Too excited to wait, you lift the peaches to your nose and the summer-sweet smell of them makes your mouth water. You reach into the tray and pick one up, salivating with anticipation. It squashes beneath your fingers and all but falls apart into a sticky, sloppy mess as you try to take a bite. It is so overripe it is one step away from being rotten. The whole tray is like it. Dismayed, you throw them away. The juice lingers on your hands.
This scenario invokes the senses but ultimately shows us that without touch, without the physical interaction from our fingertips and hands, the whole situation unravels. Had we taken the time to reach out and give one of the peaches a squeeze, rather than relying on our eyes and nose, we would have known the situation immediately and shied away from it. Instead, our sense of touch leaves us with the bitter reminder of our choice as the peach juice congeals to a sticky residue.
Touch is a fascinating sense largely because we use it so often and consider it so little. We tend to think of it as being confined to the hands, but in reality, your skin, the largest organ in your body, is your sensory boundary that allows you to interact with the world. Whether that’s a comfortable bed, a hot bath, a pinching pair of shoes, or a paper cut, all of these are touch-based interactions that we come to know through our skin.
With the advice on wearing gloves and masks now widespread throughout the public, the entire way in which we interact with the world has been changed. There is a sudden fear around touch, a fear that the virus lurks unseen on every surface, that every irresponsible person is spreading their germs far and wide through every door handle, shopping trolley, and unripe avocado they put back. We bundle ourselves in masks and gloves but we are restricting the way in which we know and interact with the world as a result.
Fear has driven us away from our usual interactions and into ones we are unsure of how to navigate. Should I be washing my shopping? Should I touch my post? Can I stroke my cat if it’s been outside? We are unsure of how to interact with the world. We are afraid to touch things, to be touched and any object with an unknowable variable to it is equivalent to a breeding ground for death. Our senses have become side-lined or lost altogether as we try to navigate this new landscape.
Abjection and COVID-19
The fear of the unknown virus has strong ties to a theory known as abjection. Abjection, as first described by Kristeva in her stellar 1980 work The Powers of Horror, is that which we reject, which we oppose as it is not like us, whether at a known or unknown level. Kristeva makes an excellent observation about the repulsion we have to something as simple as skin of milk:
“When the eyes see or the lips touch that skin on the surface of milk-harmless, thin as a sheet of cigarette paper, pitiful as a nail paring-I experience a gagging sensation and, still farther down, spasms in the stomach, the belly; and all the organs shrivel up the body, provoke tears and bile, increase heartbeat, cause forehead and hands to perspire. Along with sight-clouding dizziness, nausea makes me balk at that milk cream, separates me from the mother and father who proffer it. “I” want none of that element, sign of their desire; “I” do not want to listen, “I” do not assimilate it, “I” expel it.” (1980: 3)
You have likely seen images circulating the Internet about how people seen to be coughing or sneezing in public are now reviled, seen as unclean harbingers of the virus. I found myself stared at with utter horror when I sneezed twice while queuing for my local Sainsburys the other day. I apologised and blamed hayfever (which was true, I had just been running) and people were immediately sympathetic — they can understand hayfever; I have quantified it, named it and the threat of the unknown is lifted.
It can be argued that the very physical reaction we have to the abject is an act of self-preservation. Our animal nature tells us to stay away from things that might hurt us, such as rotting meat, mouldy fruit, pus, blood, corpses, faeces etc. So in a sense, our automatic reaction of wanting to avoid areas, people and objects that may have this dangerous virus is ingrained within us. These types of reactions are also linked again to our sensory perception of the world — we can see the decay, smell the rot and touch the ruin to know this is unsafe and we should avoid it.
Fearing ourselves and society
The fear that surrounds COVID-19 is justifiable. Not only is this virus a killer, you have the added factor of it being invisible. When we are unable to see something, to name it and quantify it (as I did with my hayfever sneezes), the fear is much more intense. Think about horror movies — the moment you see the monster it’s game over. You can see it, you can know it, and so you can defeat it.
Knowing that this virus is spread between humans, and with helpful if fear-mongering messaging from the UK government including phrases such as ‘Anyone can get it. Anyone can spread it’ makes us so fearful of each other, of other bodies, that we begin to perceive anyone as outside of our households as other, even as abject. I can only imagine this struggle to overcome fear is impossibly difficult in key workers and particularly within the NHS treating those with COVID-19. Fighting that primal urge to protect yourself from disease, even when you are properly equipped with PPE, shows yet again how outstanding those working on the frontline are.
In a general day-to-day scenario, you’d be surprised how often your body, your sensory gateway to the world, meshes with other bodies. Standing jammed on a tube, breathing the same stuffy air, or shaking hands at a board meeting and handing round the biscuits, we are touching and interacting with the same objects. Bodies slide into and collide with each other through the smallest of interactions, and things like our sweat, our breath, become mingled. Sara Ahmed (2000, 2004, 2010) and Donna Haraway (1991) both discussed how bodies are in constant motion, interaction and collision with each other: skin brushing skin, lips kissing hair, fingerprints left on a keypad, saliva on the rim of a coffee cup.
We are now hyper-aware of how we interact with the world and how we leave a very physical presence through our bodies. Our own bodies could be betraying us, as ‘asymptomatic carriers’. We can no longer use our senses to the fullest degree to know the world around us. We have been stripped and are locked in the dark, desperately trying to find order and understanding in a way that we have never had to consider before.
Finding order in chaos
Our modern life is not prepared for us to be told no, to have to be fearful and mindful of every action we take. We are used to a high level of freedom, to a world we can move through easily and without fear, all luxuries and necessities at our fingertips. To have this virus thrown into the midst of our lives has caused chaos — suddenly we are facing real fear of the unknown, fear for our families, safety and livelihoods.
“It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection, but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules” (1980: 4).
Although written 40 years ago, Kristeva’s words show exactly how true it still is today. COVID-19 does not respect the rules — it is not playing by the standards of our modern society and it is perhaps that which we hate it for the most. Most of us will have never experienced a scenario of death and illness like this, so we have no reference point to draw from, no knowledge to fall back on, and no real idea of how the future will look.
While a positive outlook is difficult at present, returning to the ideas of the physical and sensory interactions we have, I would encourage you to use your senses, use your body, and find ways in which you can engage those 5 senses safely. Dig your fingers into the dirt when gardening, stick your hands into dough and make bread. Consider the hundreds of little ways you touch, see, hear, smell and taste every day and how every other human is experiencing these in their own ways as well. Chaos is unsustainable, and order can and will return to our lives.
Originally published at http://hjalbonemedia.com on April 30, 2020.
