🦠 [03] Contact-free Delivery: Moral Conductivity
#CoronavirusBible ~ Theological Vignettes
🤝 [03] Objects and persons carry essences which are clean or unclean. This contaminant quality is transferrable through touch.
[1] Contact-free: Delivery as transgression
“..Anyone who goes into the house while it is closed up will be unclean till evening. Anyone who sleeps or eats in the house must wash their clothes..” Lv14v46-47
🏠 Boundaried home. Stay-At-Home orders have created a new and very heightened consciousness of the home’s interior as a bounded boundaried domain, with incumbent responsibilities to keep-in and to keep-out.
↔️ Inwards and Outwards. Doubly interesting is the experience of the boundary being read both ways from both sides, containment of pollution within and/or constrainment of pollution at large without. The home’s redoubled boundarification is socially, psychologically and practically being reinforced from both sides of the perimeter - fear of letting contagion in, guilt for letting contagion out. The fear is transmission, transmission through “contact”, the accidental migration of corruption via carrier objects which transgress the membrane of the bubble.
🎈 Social media bubble. Against the airborne and personal vectors of the virus, the home must become hermetically defended and increasingly so. The aesthetics and pragmatics of living en-bubbled are corroborated and exacerbated by the digital facility to project the image of the world-outside on to interior screens and surfaces as a 2-dimensional simulacrum. The contemporary home has become an unprecedentedly perfectly private world cocooned by digital veneers, wrapped air-tight by a skin of hyper-real media portals.
🚪 Air lock. The doorway as medicalised threshold is now a gauntlet to be run in negotiating access to this novel radicalised interiority. The door is totemic ~ a shabbat elevator. Dezeen’s list is as much symbolic as hygenic. Contact-free Delivery is the formal ritual tailored as an air-lock for this now morally problematised access. Safety hinges on the formal and spatial qualities of the vulnerable portal separating sacred space from the profane, quarantine from the contagion, us from them, clean from unclean.
☣️ Rupture. Pizza delivery becomes a conceptual penetration, a tearing of the membrane, a bursting of the bubble, a fracturing of our touch-screen interface which had kept us in safe suspension as bodyless avatars on the infinite network. The delivery agent’s presence whips back the veil of safe detachment, snags our embodiment in an unsanitary way.
👩⚕️ Limbo dance. Contact-free delivery seeks, by a strange choreography of deferential dancing, to maintain the enmoated self as discontinuous from the world beyond. Aloof but vexingly dependent, we are, simultaneously, the hapless patient and the nervous surgeon in an architectural game of Operation.
[2] Contact-free: From moral conduct to moral conductivity.
“..Do not be hasty in the laying on of hands .. keep yourself pure..” 1Ti5v22
🤝 New tactility. Coronavirus has made us newly conscious of the tactile. Knowing ourselves as touching-beings and as beings-touched, and that, in touch, there is a transfer. More philosophically significant than the “uncleanness” or “impurity” of the quality transferred is the notion of transferral at all.
🔜 Suddenly premodern. It is worthy of meditation, the speed of the adoption of a novel psychological apprehension of objects-as-fomites which transmit a quality through touch. We were a modern citizenry, nothing was untouchable. We were confidently inhabiting sanitised urban realms, hand-shaking with hygenic indifference, clasping door handles, chugging down chowder from the inert crockery of an amoral world that could not possibly conduct a moral quality across its surfaces. We had been pressing ourselves into the world without guilt of contaminating others by/with our inner sinfulness, and without fear of leaving any trail of culpable breadcrumbs. We had banished the touch-wood amuletry of a former superstition in an act of haptic iconoclasm. We were unsuperstitious Christians preoccupied with pure personal moral conduct (eg 1Pt2v12), giving no attention to our indirect moral impact and the passive conduction of our unconscious influence and affect (eg 1Cor8v13). But now.
⚡ Conductive objects. Innocuous artefacts have transformed into tendrilled threats. Escalator rails, bank notes, pizza boxes.. have become occult totems slopped with a mortal stickiness, crawling with the spikey denizens of a fairytale macabre. And we ourselves are likewise objects leaking a pollution out of our asymptomatic pores, all while being reciprocally vulnerable to clingy death from an invisible legion that microscopically litters the physical realm. The shift in mentality is profound. Enlightened moderns, Christian or no, are now suddenly forced to consider that there is not merely the internal conscience of moral conduct to attend to, but a chaotic spill of culpable incidental conductivity.
🚷 Don’t touch. The new awareness of touching has generated a knee-jerk flood of new thou-shalt-nots, don’t shake hands, don’t touch door nobs, don’t touch your face, donottouchyourface.com Because all things are alive, dangerous and not inert.
🧚 We are all animist now. If not-inert.. what then? Fomites are the spiritual aedicules of a re-enchanted universe of occupied objects housing angels and demons. I want to believe in such a depthed universe, in which the host of heaven dwells amongst us; in which the physical carries substantial poetic meaning through essences; in which salt is not merely incidentally a parable; in which the creating word who predestined also sees a semiotic telos through to an interpretation that is not inaccessible - I want to believe in substantial parables as words spoken by a word speaking a purpose to all creation to so speak.
🤖 Against Abstraction. Coronavirus is putting to siege that widely-held belief in objects-as-inert - ever an unstable worldview but is now undermined on every side. I have inhabited that flat dull safe abstract unmiraculous cosmology, I have behaved accordingly, designed accordingly, and overcompensated. I have permitted a bland subjectivism - believing that the spiritual power or the poetic meaning of objects is a matter of interpretation. But now, a darker and more potent ecology resurges.
🐉 Nature is. Nature, safe when abstract, comforting in a bouquet, entrancing in an Attenborough montage. But actually. IRL. Nature is a terrifying agent, a cunning actor, a thickly substantial serpentine subject who jealously contends for her own and whose rocks cry out with vorpal vengeance. Rightly were we afraid of her dragons, prudently have previous generations lived timid and limited ambitions. Nature is walking death, calculating peril, diabolical intent, red in tooth and claw..
“..There was no confidence that the codes of nature’s laws could ever be unveiled and read, because there was no assurance that a divine being, even more rational than ourselves, had ever formulated such a code capable of being read..” Joseph Needham - The Grand Titration
🌱 Theo-naturalists. The project of dominion, when it is not domination, is a curiously theistic project - predicated on a right estimation of the world’s wildness, and predicated on a steady confidence in the created order’s author’s involvement in sustaining humanity in a cultural mandate to seek and savour that orderliness. It is not a self-evident project. This enchanted world which is alive to touch, and responsive to enquiry, is ontologically intermediary - beneath infinity but above utility.
👾 De-natured nature. The post-theistic armchair naturalism that I otherwise entertain at arm’s length has utterly lost touch with nature ~ in this, I settle for yogamom monism, a hollywood animism with its selective but allusive infinity and its performative enlightenment and recreational dalliance with an aestheticised nature (A selective spirituality that recurs in such as AR’s Big Rethink). Or I settle for the expedient fatalism of a bitter utilitarian access to nature, shedding late-capitalist crocodile tears for the true-environmental-cost of my privilege, and resting ultimately ensconced in a synthetic analgesic totality. Neither version of myself really wrestles to touch and be touched by nature in all its awesome horror.
🍃 What then? When nature breaches the defences of my pseudo-naturalism, and it unplugs my fossil-fuel-fortress. Have I the faith to touch nature-as-nature and still remain a Christian optimist? Nature’s normal is far weirder than we had grown accustomed to in our tyranny of sentimentality.
🤗 Holy Haptics. I consider there should emerge a movement of Christian hapticians, pursuing tactile incarnation unto death, proceeding fearless-in-Christ and/but with a right reverence for the conductivity of new nature consistent with a Bible that is replete with enchanted, and redemptively enchanted, surfaces. [I will consider reverse entropy more in Contact-Free Part [02] - the Hapticians’ fearless freedom is not blythe manifest-destiny magic-thinking callously going maskless - see Gal5v13 etc.]
🧤 Like a glove. The conductive potency of the material world is seen in such as clothing in the Bible, where it is onticological: spooky, basically. The bleeding woman touches Jesus' cloak Lk8v44 and the sick are cured by Paul's handkerchief Ac19v12.. This is the Turin-shroud Catholicism your mother warned you about. The Christian life of culture-making relentlessly is to transform the ordinary as water-to-wine, to transfigure all things by a luminous permeation ~ like MJ in the Billie Jean video).
[3] Contact-free: Untouchably Sacred Spaces/Objects
“..And the anger of the LORD was kindled against Uzzah, and he struck him down because he put out his hand to the ark, and he died there before God..” 1Chr13v10
“..by designating a sacred object or place, the religious person creates a centre in space and thereby gives an orientation to the ‘chaos of homogeneity’ or the ‘formless fluidity of profane space.’ It stands as an image of the centre of the world at large..” Mircea Eliade - The Sacred and the Profane
“..Every sacred space implies a hierophany, an irruption of the sacred that results in detaching a territory from the surrounding cosmic milieu and making it qualitatively different..” Mircea Eliade - The Sacred and the Profane
⚡ Contact-free. Above, we’ve considered that [1] Contact-free delivery reflects a renewed consciousness of the home as a bounded domain. And, secondly, [2] Contact-free delivery is predicated on consciousness of objects as carriers, and of all matter as conductive. So, then, Contact-free delivery is the prescribing of a moral system regulating permitted spatial behaviours within this moral ontological order. I’ll consider [3] demarking those spaces/objects and [4] the agents at play.
🚴 “Contact-free” as a language for my tacit creed. Covid-19 has provoked me to think ~ less about the new conditions that are created, but the existing conditions that are revealed: the existing prejudices, the existing structures that made this plausible, the existing language that has been turned to the task of apprehending the novel. These regulations are giving an explicit liturgy to our tacit religion. Contact-free, as if previously transactional fastfood involved heavy petting.. I’ve never touched a delivery person, but now that I must not, I am made to see that I have always been the high priest of an atomised congregation of one, presiding over the domestic sanctuary of an infinitesimally private faith.
🆙 Holiness begets set-apartness. Set-apartness begets Holiness. Is holiness man-made? Are these dualisings mere psycho-social orderings, pragmatic categorisings and powerplay, or do they reflect real substance? In this revival of murky dark ecology and strange realist magic, which way is up?
“..“Transparency” .. “simultaneity”, “interpenetration”, “superimposition”, “ambivalence” : in the literature or contemporary architecture these words, and others like them, are often used as synonyms..” Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky - Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal
😇 Nothing was sacred any more. Architecture, literally and phenomenally, dissolved into crystals of open-plan infinity. Globalism had been making a virtue of borderlessness, the liberal blur of under-distinction, the deconstructed celebration of ambiguity, the export of a pliable, morphable, fungible supra-system.
🌐 Nothing, except me. Lines are drawn for the constitution of a thung thing: this and not that. Contra enmeshment, we-as-persons distinguish where I end and you begin. Unless we want to be enmeshed? Nothing was sacred anymore, except the sacred subjective node of the self and its encasement in the home.
🏡 Holy housing. Sacred realism minimally affirms that the world is not homogeneous. Red-as-red paint and blue-as-blue paint are marshalled into indented concave wells on the palette of possible colouring. In this way, lines are drawn across our symbollic landscape to keep out pollution, to distinguish the holy, and to keep things thung. Who gets to decide where the lines are? What cost can be justified for what strength of barrier? With no Other, no civic God with no telos for no polis, the sacred is turned in on itself to the individualist’s temple to self. The home is a sacred space, as a reliquary for the mythical menagerie of my own making - the bento box in which I am the delicacy. Global games can then be played as cerebral simulations from a safely mediated distance, life-on-demand can be dialed in.
🍱 Entempling and Godness. The bible affirms fractal hierophanies ~ see the Russian doll of the things-in-things of the temple’s holy of holy of holies.. - we erect signposts to the Otherness of God at all scales, paint icons, parables and portals to orient the mind’s eye and a community’s energy toward a reference point outside of itself. What is God like? How so holy? Whence personhood? Wither justice? What is the real made of? All to say, the popular liberal imagination wants to believe that all is relative and that all should be as one and that all distinction is power play. I consider that this view is held as a luxury, it held inconsistently and is held as an emotional crutch to cushion past injury - I have felt this injury, but there must be better.
🔲 Black and white justice. If perilous qualities can be transferred through touch, a morphological division of the world becomes plausible and becomes imperative. The moment of plague is a teachable moment that forces many questions - not in some Righteous Mind coup that justifies all disgust, all walls, all apartheid. From the pragmatic, to the symbolic, to the superabundantly more: if divisioning, then how to excellently? If divisioning, what is the difference between damage-limitation pollution control, and a goodness-maximisation of dispensing healing? How to curate a kettling-for-others rather than cliquing-against-others?
“..And behold, the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom..” Mt27v51
🛕 Dis-entempling and access. Christianity exists within time, perpetually. Elijah comes. By contrast with the tombs-of-the-prophets Lk11v47. By contrast with we-had-hoped Lk24v21. The Kingdom is a happening. Present participle. And Christ as a living word is perpetually being spoken into a dynamic. First to be apprehended as a thing, then as a ruptured thing-overflowing.
🏡 Overflow. In this way, the fashioning of the home as a sacred space need not be a self-related act of protectionism, but as a liturgy of the re-enchantment of previously dormitory non-spaces, the civic vitalisation of the cellular cells of the body politic, the arbitrary but precious enshrinement of place purposed to exist for the benefit of its non-members.
[4] Contact-free: Untouchably Profane Agents
“..If this man were a prophet, he would have known who and what sort of woman this is who is touching him, for she is a sinner..” Lk7v39-40
“..Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, syphilis, a sexually transmitted infection, materialized in bodies the forms of repression and exclusion that dominated modernity.. ..prostitute became the living body that condensed all abject political signifiers during the syphilis epidemic.. ..The first phase of the epidemic disproportionately affected what were then called the Four H’s: homosexuals, Haitians, hemophiliacs, and heroin users. Later, hookers were added to the list..” Paul B. Preciado - Learning from the Virus
🤝 [1] Touch was on the wane - socio-politically. The frictionless future eschews touch. We were already wirelessly paying contactlessly for hands-free services rendered by an untouchable underclass of zero-hour contractors who inhabit mechanised fulfilment realm out-of-sight, out-of-mind. “Contact-free delivery” despite its claimed ambitions for reciprocal protection, is a policing of bodies in an asymmetric transaction - corporations calculatedly de-risking consumption for the consumer - it cannot avoid the insinuation of a cockroach class of disease-vector service workers. The denizens of the gig economy are meat robots. Stand-ins for a driverless future, prototypes for the fembot future of total mechanical reproduction. In the unevenly distributed future that is already here, the bourgeois are serviced by an untouchable precariat class who must use their bodies as a means of production ~ and it is this complicated class of archetypal tax-collector-and-prostitute whom the church is most out of touch with.
“..What will have been invented after the crisis is a new utopia of the immunitary community and a new form of high-tech mass control of human bodies. The subjects of the neoliberal technical-patriarchal societies that Covid-19 is in the midst of creating do not have skin; they are untouchable; they do not have hands..” Paul B. Preciado - Learning from the Virus
“..A friend reported that a venture capitalist recently told her he saw a “touchless” future. I fear this is what the technocrats and AI people and fascists are dreaming of – a touchless future. The body has always been that lowly human thing that got in the way..” Touch saved me from loneliness - V (formerly Eve Ensler) - Guardian
🤝 [2] Touch was on the wane - technically. Cyborg consumers raised on images have developed an embodiment too frail to touch, and perversely prefer a simulation to the real thing. Covid is reported to have accelerated the growth of x-rated patronage multiplying both production and consumption of this touchless economy eg 1, 2. LuckyDevilPDX’s Covid inspired neon anime sci-fi dystopian enterprise is last mile distribution for an OnlyFans universe - the physical extension of pharmacopornography’s infrastructure.
💒 Touch faith. So, online church, camming and the ways we lose touch.. ~ in so far as online church is presuming to simulate covenantal and incarnate community, it is for me a severe question as to whether Covid-driven numerical “success” will warp the fabric of the church around metrics proliferating cyborg and escapist embodiments. And if not, how not?
“..Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body..” 1Co6v18
“..Touch. It is touch that is the deadliest enemy of chastity, loyalty, monogamy, gentility with its codes and conventions and restraints. By touch we are betrayed and betray others.. an accidental brushing of shoulders or touching of hands.. hands laid on should in a gesture of comfort that list like a thief that took, not gave, that wanted, not offered, that awoke, not pacified. When one flesh is waiting, there is electricity in the merest contact..” Wallace Stegner (via Lore Fergusson Wilbert - Handle with Care)
🤝 [3] Touch was on the wane - morally. Contact-free Delivery is consistent with, and exacerbates, existing trajectories: [1] sociological stratifying of an untouchable servile class; [2] preferencing disembodiment and simulation; and here [3] a moral suspicion of all touch.
🔞 All bad touch. Church had become contact-free long before Covid-19. Flee 2Tm2v22. How far? Beyond reproach Ti1v6? Above suspicion 2Co8v21? Beyond the Billy Graham rule? Touch is ambiguous. Touch makes us all vulnerable. Touch is not a risk worth taking. Touch is trust and we live in trustless times. And so, thusly framed, whether by unforgiveable commission or coldly over-engineered omission, all approaches to touch are trauma. Touch is contentious, politicised and, dangerous. Touch is only power and only by the privileged, based on objectification, and emotional shallowing, and a lascivious addiction to hands and feet: there will be no hugging hoodies - all touch is only grabbing pussies. Touch is a gateway sin, an open wound exploit, money-sex-&-power is a three corded gordian noose, and the tawdry threads are each unravelled twines from the tapestry of a meat market mode of considering the human person. My flight from touch via all-touch-as-trauma and all-touch-as-tyranny is a tragic SOS scrawled in fluid leaking from the cadaver of a rubberised human. Who will save me from this body of death? Who will redeem touch?
👐 Restoring Touch? I will try in [Contact-free Delivery 02] to ponder lost touch and to explore Christ redeeming touch - Lore Fergusson Wilbert makes an excellent defence of touch - if anyone fancies a Covid bookgroup. Many, as V above, in this season are feeling the loss, but for many its loss is a lesser evil. I’ve never heard a sermon on touch-as-touch. It is an open question for me, how do you create the conditions, rituals, architecture, relational fabric of trust, at scale, where the best possible touch can be multiplied without risk?
[5] Contact-free: Threshold Anxiety and Prophylactic Architecture
“Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me..” Rv3v20
“..The new necropolitical frontier has shifted from the coast of Greece toward the door of your home. Lesbos now starts at your doorstep.. ..For years, we considered migrants and refugees infectious to the community and placed them in detention centers—political limbos where they remained without rights and without citizenship; perpetual waiting rooms. Now we are living in detention centers in our own homes..” Paul B. Preciado - Learning from the Virus
🚪 Doorstepping. Domestically we have perhaps never been more siloed than in this exponentially divided new gilded age of gated access developments and social media bubbles, demographically stratified by age, education and wealth, brittle to shame by association. Contact-free Delivery is a spatial performance at that threshold where worlds collide. Primarily a problematic fomite object, carried by a problematic agent, is received into a sacred interior through a vulnerable portal. But, secondarily, reciprocally (but not symmetrically), a problematic fomite object, by a vulnerable agent, to the very brink and within catching distance of the contaminated house.
🚪 Your front door is the frontier. Beyond which the threat is less the killer/burglar as rather it is an atmosphere, an airbourne spirit of comeuppance. There is an underclass whose misfortune is contagious and too close to the bone. They not the noble rustique of idealised artisanal poverty, not the low hanging fruit of the Victorian philanthropist's 'deserving-poor', but American Honey's icky scourge - an unsolvable mass kept in invisible quarantine, lest they sully our illusion of progress.
🚪 Gateways of fear and shame. This symbolic 2 metres of air is thick with contagious potential and architecturally unresolved anxiety. Andrea Arnold exquisitely represents the threshold condition in the mother’s guardedness that is both shame of the contaminant quality of the corrupt interior and fear of the wild unknown without - both located in a feral and irreligious sexuality.
~ A different, and unanxious, threshold is possible.
🤝 If you have seen Attack the Block, you will know that the concept of 'unclean' is alive and kicking today in south London “..You shove that in my face and them fangs are goin’ up in your tits.. ..I don’t want no chlamydia..” ~ uncleanness is a medicalised, sexualised profanity transmitted through touch.
🛰️ Joe Cornish makes full use of a vocabulary of thresholds, peepholes, liftdoors, stainless steel barriering, elevated walkways and ominous fortifying found in utopian mass housing. Just so, we all now live inside elaborately serviced hermetically sealed architecture catering to buffered-selves, gnostic cyborgs, fortressed preppers.
🌃 Built on the site of a former lock hospital in Elephant and Castle, the architecture imposed on such as the Heygate, with its hermetic thresholds, the alien language, the extra-terrestrial giantism ~ represent a hands-off government’s cynical approach to contagion, the state washing its hands of responsibility for civic felicity.
~ A different and undefended threshold is possible.
More on architectural alienation and threshold anxiety here.