Abstract
Our bodies have become attuned to a new regime of sensory experiences that now mediate our participation in the public sphere. This commentary is about the day I started to quarantine my voice and to wear a mask. In it, I explore the mask as a media object, and as a border between the body and the commons, including the ethics of communicable transmission. It marks some provisional thoughts in the context of a broader project on mask cultures.
“Phone, wallet, keys, mask. . .good to go!”
My mask has become part of my checkmark routine before leaving the house. My mask is within me, one of the strategies inherent to my existence. It is governed by a simple law: contain the spread.
When I wrote this, I was one of the few in my neighborhood who wore a mask at my grocery store. In hiding my face, I became more visible to those around me. The grocery clerks take note of the mask-wearers. They seem to express an appreciation, given how enthusiastic they are for conversation. I am surprised they can hear me speak, though. My mask muffles my words, but my voice escapes the quarantine of the mask. My voice is a tool I keep in my hands and my eyes.
Like all of the data and information surrounding the emergence of COVID-19, information about mask-wearing is ambiguous and sometimes misleading. Some articles claiming that masks are ineffective have been retracted (retractionwatch.com). From the perspective of leading medical experts, the main problem has been that people are unaware of the reason to wear a mask: not to prevent oneself from getting it, but to prevent oneself from spreading it. Officers of Health in Canada were, until recently, explaining this point with patience to journalists who appeared unmoved by the idea. The situation is different now. They seem to get it. While masks in Japan, for instance, have come to signify a solidarity with the community—for instance, by showing one’s illness as a means to prevent the infection of the whole group (Burgess & Horii, 2012)—in Canada and the United States, wearing a mask seems to have sometimes signalled obedience and defied the rugged individualism of atomistic subjectivity. In the United States, recently, masks are political identifiers of the Left and the Right (Shirbman, 2020).
Another point has been raised by medical experts who exclaim that nobody wears a mask in just the right way (Huynh, 2020). Some experts claim that masks, to be worn properly, must be changed numerous times a day, and that they become essentially ineffective the more moisture they collect from the wearer’s breath. If people don’t wear masks properly, and if they are still under the impression that they themselves are protected instead of protecting, they could stand at a greater risk of either getting or spreading the virus. But, gradually, our health officers are suggesting that perhaps it might be in our best interest to wear masks. The mask, thus, becomes not a thing that we wear but a gesture that we perform.
The Multi-sensory Image of the Mask
I downloaded instructions for my mask from a shared document on SafeCast, a Free and Open Source Hardware (FOSH) community that is known for expediting citizen science initiatives in Japan after the Fukishima disaster (safecast.com). My mask is dark green in color and is double-layered with an insert for a piece of tissue, which I slightly moisten and then dry in order to tighten its pores. The lower elastic goes up in front of my ears to the top of my head, the upper elastic grasping the back of my neck. This keeps the mask safely secure. I’m supposed to shave my beard, I’ve read, but I’ve committed only to trimming it down. I am not convinced that it is entirely possible to wear the mask correctly, but I can use it as a gesture.
I am very much aware of my voice in the mask. My voice is not projected into and returned from the space I inhabit. My voice is compacted, truncated and filtered, and it informs me that I am occupying a space far more condensed than I am accustomed to. The transmission is limited in this voice. I am especially aware of the sound of my breath, which travels from the side of the mask and into my ears. If I have a coffee before I wear my mask, it irritates my eyes. Mints are worse. Breath and voice are not in a hierarchy; instead, they are part of one transmission machine.
The timbre of my voice is quite muffled, like I’m doubling up on the sound of my voice from the inside. Customarily, we hear two versions of our own voices: one from within the vocal cords that resonates in the skull, and one that is the sound of the voice as it leaves the mouth and resonates off of surfaces and in the air around us. With the mask, the inner voice and external voice are more closely intertwined. The voice thus becomes more internal. To be heard, I speak clearly, loudly; I enunciate, and I’m convinced by the seemingly seamless interactions I have that I am, in fact, succeeding at communication. My voice does not radiate outwards into space but instead goes into my hands. By this, I mean that I point more dramatically at ideas. My voice is in my eyes more dramatically as well. My eyes widen more, narrow more, my eyebrows raise. All this to ask a clerk where they shelve the Ovaltine.
We have lived previous pandemics as a risk (see Abeysinghe & White, 2010), but the COVID-19 is strangely indeterminate. Mask-wearing is a reorientation of the body in space, of making sense of a new relation to space. Few people at the grocery store wore masks when I wrote this, but many of them were surprisingly more careless with their proximity to others than the unmasked. I took this as an indication that they interpret the mask as self-protective instead of spread-preventative. But with no certain answers, and with pandemic preparedness still a relatively recent invention (Lynteris, 2019), it’s difficult to know what to do when bodies become so suddenly indeterminate and the rules for social order become so nascent. We are occupying, in our emerging relationships with masks, an alien phenomenology akin to Lisa Blackman’s (2019) recent theorizing of data and embodiment. The mask, along with other (sometimes ambiguous) regimes of social distancing, makes us measuring creatures. In this shimmer of information and data, we enter into spaces that are ambiguous.
On a broad scale, our pandemic culture (maybe permanent, maybe temporary) encourages people to stay home to protect not their own bodies, but the bodies of others. This is the one of a few simple preventative measures we need to adopt to stop the spread of a disease. Still, the advertising campaigns that show people getting through it together—by connecting through social media, becoming more attuned to home projects, and getting acquainted with a new way of life—tend to rub up against a good amount of resistance. This resistance appears to be especially the case in the United States, where it is linked to perceptions of these strategies as a state-enforced code of conduct.
Nevertheless, the public health advice under this crisis is clear. The British Medical Journal published several open-access editorials on the benefit of mask-wearing. Yet, both sides of the political debate about wearing/not wearing a mask seem to want the same thing: to protect. Populists are on record claiming the mask may hurt those who breathe carbon dioxide. The retort is that not wearing the mask will hurt everyone else. The health and safety of the population is what both sides have in mind. The mask is the end of freedom, for one, and the end of existence for the other. What is evident is that both sides agree that masks have a role to play in the sacrifice of the body.
These diverse views resonate with Foucault’s notion of the sacrificed body in religion, and the sacrificed subject in science. Particularly relevant is the sacrifice to violence that Michel Foucault wrote about in Nietzsche, Genealogy, History. “Where religions once demanded the sacrifice of bodies,” Foucault writes, “knowledge now calls for experimentation on ourselves, calls us to sacrifice the subject of knowledge” (1977: 163). Knowledge does not protect. The virus transforms the body, along with our sociality, into new forms that are haunted by a shadow of what once was normal. People play tennis between rooftops, they Reddit-cast their newfound at-home hobbies, or they lick food in grocery stores as part of the “COVID challenge.” Bodies perform these discursive formations, through which the category of transmission becomes articulated and re-articulated.
Some of the most alien spectacles have come from celebrities. When it dawned on us that we may have to face months, if not years, of boredom and isolation, celebrities began trying to connect over the Internet to their fan bases, sometimes in quite off-tune expressions of mock sympathy. For example, the personality-driven culture of celebrities peaked when some sang, many from their acres of private land or mansions, John Lennon’s Imagine. But in place of celebrities, new heroes emerged: in the United States, Dr. Anthony Fauci was highly regarded for having openly disagreed with President Trump, an act that had cost scores of employees their high-ranking positions before. In Canada, public health officials became minor celebrities (in my home province of Alberta, our calm and steady public health officer, Dr. Deena Hinshaw, with no change of tenor in the months that she gave daily updates, found her likeness on coffee cups, t-shirts, and memes). Front-line workers were applauded nightly. The character of the public figure took precedence over the personality of the celebrity: Jack Black dancing on his mansion grounds was not nearly as captivating as nurses dancing in hospital wards. Interestingly, while celebrities sang and corporations adjusted their logos, the World Health Organization teamed up with @dudewithsign to promote grassroots messages about not spreading the virus, an alliance that was received ungrudgingly.
The Mask We Choose
I am not entirely certain whether I am a carrier of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, but since it can be spread up to two-and-a-half days before a person becomes symptomatic, I feel it is my best decision to continue to wear a mask when out in public. Certainly, the COVID-19 pandemic has done a number on the foundations of our disciplines and areas of study. The world listened to a public health, community-focused message that ground the neoliberal economy to an unexpected pause. With bated breath, we now wait for the economy to return. But the emergence of the public health discourse has centralized some items that have long held the interest of cultural theorists: that bodies leak, that bodies are affective, that they affect and are affected by others, that they follow a code of contagion, that they occupy atmospheres, and that they move through an affective agency that is pre-linguistic and pre-conscious. For instance, if we become mask-wearers, we are acknowledging the co-existence and co-constitution of nonhuman entities in the composition of the public sphere. We are also acknowledging, out in the open, that we carry things with us and share things that are not of our choosing, but rather predetermine our actions. The COVID-19 pandemic raises the possibility for media objects, such as masks, to turn individualism towards a new collectivity.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was undertaken, in part, thanks to funding from the Canada Research Chairs program
