Structures of Feeling and COVID-19 in America with Karl Nycklemoe

Three images encapsulate two entwined structures of feeling that emerged in the United States during the continuing COVID-19 pandemic, the presence of the facemask and the presence of absence [1]. The direction and future of these structures of feeling—and the pandemic—is unknown. However, these structures of feeling can help us unpack the meaning of the pandemic as we move forward to whatever the future may bring.

The pandemic has politicized the facemask, transforming an effective, traditional tool in health and medicine into a political statement. One form of the politicization of the facemask has already been exhaustively covered in the daily news cycle and social media; antimaskers place individual autonomy dis-engaged from community responsibility over the health of the nation, genuine civic engagement, and scientific evidence. However, wearing the facemask is more than a political statement on responsibility, science, and health, as its political symbology has also been integrated into protest and activism against police brutality:

A couple wears masks that read “I Can’t Breathe” during a demonstration in Minneapolis on Saturday. Jim Urquhart for NPR

In the case of this image, two protestors wear masks emblazoned with the statement “I Can’t Breathe” at an early demonstration against the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Here, demonstrative protest and the pandemic are bound together as one event. The use of the facemask, stitched either visibly with thread or sonically with chanting, conveys the necessity and power of breath and combines at once two acts of solidarity against formerly separate threats to bodily autonomy. The first is the threat black bodies face when in their home or in the world. The second is an act of solidarity against the threat of respiratory infection by mere breath alone. Strangely, then, the facemask is symbolic of resisting governmental tyranny in both its absence and presence. In refusing to wear a mask, an antimasker protests. However, it must be remembered that wearing a mask, too, has been an act of protest in these strange times. The facemask asserts the power of community engagement and the prioritization of scientific and public health over personal comfort, while simultaneously condemning governmental and bureaucratic allowance of police brutality with the refrain “I Can’t Breathe” memorializing the dying words of a murdered man.

Yet, as many structures exist at once, the presence of the mask has also been integrated into environmental politics. In Figure 2, a California sea lion encounters a discarded N95 facemask in the California Bay:

California Sea Lion Plays With Mask: A curious California sea lion swims toward a face mask at the Breakwater dive site in Monterey, California. Ralph Pace.

Here the facemask is, paradoxically, both a mitigant and aggravator to global crisis [2]. To some, this image could be a celebration of a dual rejection of science-based warnings of global catastrophe; discarding the facemask as litter rejects both warnings from environmentalists and health experts alike. To others, this image may represent the tension between protecting our communities and protecting our earth. How can we strive to keep our neighbors healthy, yet do so in a sustainable way? Regardless, it is the presence of the facemask here, in this bay, that binds together the meaning of our oceans and that of public health, even if contradictorily.

The final image, Figure 3, indicates the convergence of the presence of absence and the presence of the facemask itself. The image depicts an entirely mask-less crowd save for a single individual near the center, at the Chicago Lollapalooza, 2021:

Grandson Crowd Surfs at Lollapalooza in Chicago on July 30th, 2021. Sacha Lecca for Rolling Stone.

Here is where identification of changing and emergent structures becomes, at this time, difficult. The moment has not passed. Has the natural disaster passed, as cities regain the human presence? Does the image depict a foreboding future, where the delta variant surges across America as many forego facemasks, killing thousands more? Or is this image demonstrative of the end of the facemask in American culture? Is the single masked individual a vestige of the pandemic or the priestess Cassandra reborn, cursed to utter true prophecies no one believes? If none were wearing a facemask, it could be argued that this image shows a the deep-seeded wish to ‘return to normalcy.’ Yet, the single masked individual lingers, so close to the center of the photograph and the eye of the viewer. Perhaps this image, or all three, displays the undercurrent of uncertainty, a structure of feeling based in a collectively-bounded yet individually-held sense that the world on the brink of something great or terrible, that tomorrow’s salvation or destruction is still unknown. What is known, and should be remembered, is that the meaning of the pandemic is not an isolated structure or aspect in our lives, and that the presence and absence of the facemask is more than material, but social and meaningful.

Notes:

[1] The term ‘structure of feeling’ is borrowed from Raymond Williams’s work Marxism and Literature (New York, Oxford University Press, 1977). In essence, social structures delimit and guide art and meaning, but do not determine their trajectory. These structures can only be identified and theorized after the structure has emerged. Thus, lived experience and meaning is an active, emotional, and complex process in constant flux, is taken to be a private experience by whoever experiences it in their own moment, and is identifiable in analysis post-emergence.

[2] Conservationists began to warn about the potential of Covid waste as early as the summer of 2020, just as poor air quality increases severe symptoms of respiratory diseases. For further reading and images, see Ashifa Kassam, “’More Masks than Jelllyfish’: Coronavirus Waste Ends Up in Ocean,” The Guardian, June 8, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jun/08/more-masks-than-jellyfish-coronavirus-waste-ends-up-in-ocean; Cassie Shriver, “Un ”masking” the Issue: COVID-19 Pollution by Cassie Shriver,” Duke University, Nicholas School of the Environment, US Environmental Policy Blog, April 5, 2021, https://blogs.nicholas.duke.edu/env212/unmasking-the-issue-covid-19-pollution-by-cassie-shriver/.