Turning Quarantine Inside Out (original) (raw)

In this essay, I describe two logics of space that are operative in responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Quarantine partitioning is unavoidable and widespread. As a mode of governing, it presents a logic of space understood through its divisibility, making this logic seem like a given. Using the topological concept of a sphere eversion, I describe an alternative way of understanding spaces of quarantine as surroundings that we are exposed to or in contact with. I locate this alternative logic of space within already existing practices and concerns around public spaces newly invested with the possibility of exposure to and exposing others. If a quarantine presumes an orderly spatialization of the risk of exposure, then it depends on a way of thinking about space as necessarily divisible into bounded regions by partitions at set locations. Such thresholds have rapidly come to mark public, private, and psychic space in the COVID-19 pandemic. With the spread of shelter-in-place orders and various forms and degrees of lockdown, many spaces of formerly other designations (outdoor, indoor, domestic, commercial , and public alike) are now crosscut by the question of on which side of the quarantine their areas fall. In this sense, it is fair to say that "quarantine" is a condition defining spaces of life and mobility generally. There are of course enclosures around those who are ill, obviously quarantined areas such as military bases, hospitals, or the homes of the sick. But the broad application of a logic of quarantine turns being anywhere into a question about possible exposure. The SARS-CoV-2 virus and responses to it have reorganized space into areas of shelter and safety, and outside of those, wide areas of greater and lesser risk of exposure. Recent ideas in circulation-on antibody testing and "suppress and lift" or "smart" quarantines -foreshadow the fact that others have noticed the governmental potential that this general and divisible space affords. A quarantine that would cycle off and on is based on a calculation around infection rate and is only imaginable across territory that is defined by its divisibility, as affording the potential for the orderly spatialization of risk. Prior to this pandemic, imagining