It’s almost two years of being stuck in Australia and moving from one COVID lockdown to another. It could be just me, but I have a distinct feeling that I have aged far more rapidly than ever during these last two years. There is no doubt that there is a relation between a sense of stasis and what the French social scientist Pierre Bourdieu refers to as ‘social ageing’. COVID has certainly brought about a certain shrinking of life’s opportunities and intensified forms of life consisting of routinised activities in enclosed or at least strictly bounded spaces that causes a sense of ossification of the self: a decrease in social malleability that Bourdieu associates with social ageing. But my sentiment of having aged is also a bodily one. I am someone who takes their body seriously both in terms of exercise and in terms of diet. And like most Australians, I have been lucky enough to be able to continue to exercise and eat well while locked down. So the feeling of having aged in a more accelerated fashion than I have been experiencing so far must come from somewhere else. It could be that lockdown means more of what in Australia we call ‘navel-gazing’ and in that sense a heightened sense of the changes that one is undergoing. It could also be that the transition from early sixties to mid-sixties that I am undergoing is always experienced in this way, but I have not found any health literature that describes such a phenomenon. So my sentiment remains in question form: are the COVID-induced conditions of life making us age more rapidly?
A few years ago, I initiated a writing project that began as an invitation to some of my anthropology colleagues to think with the concept of decay, to examine areas of social life where a discourse of ‘decay’ comes to the fore and to treat processes of decay as an angle through which to examine the social world. The book that resulted from this exercise is coming out in October this year.[i] The project began before the pandemic. And the chapters were also finished before the pandemic. Only the editing and the introduction were finalised in pandemic time. Yet, the more I reflected on the book the more I felt that it offered me some conceptual resources with which to think my pandemic experience. This includes the question of the relation between COVID and accelerated social ageing that I asked above. I am too much of a social scientist to think that such a question can be answered without considerable research. So, I never thought that the questions around decay provided me with ready-made answers. I was noting however that decay offered an interesting perspective on the issues I was thinking about.
It is banal to note that everything is in a state of decay. The fact that it is an ongoing process is the reason why it often remains socially un-noticed, or at least, that little is made of it. But this is only so for as long as decay is proceeding according to what we think of as a ‘normal’ tempo that we end up routinising. The various chapters of the book make clear that decay comes into our consciousness and becomes a social and political issue when it is experienced as proceeding at an anomalous and aberrant pace. This building is decaying too quickly and it shouldn’t. This plastic waste is decaying too slowly, at a much slower pace than we expect waste to disintegrate. The book leaves one with a clear sense that it is beneficial to see all things as continuously and simultaneously subjected to processes that tend to either accelerate or decelerate their decay. Furthermore, all things are subjected to internal forces that determine the pace of their decay from the inside (endo-decay) and external forces that determine the slowness or rapidity of their decay from the outside (exo-decay). Some things, by their very nature, like gold and silver and plastic, decay very slowly and others, like many flowers, decay rapidly. But gold and flowers are also subjected to environmental conditions that either accelerate or decelerate their decay. Sometimes this boundary is not clear at all: what we eat comes from the outside but can either accelerate or decelerate our decay from the inside. Finally, and importantly, most things in the social world from bridges, to buildings, to houses, to offices are subjected to a labour of maintenance. The quality of this maintenance plays an important role in determining the pace of decay. After the book was finished I amused myself trying to think of a term for this generalised study of decay. Decayology did not sound nice at all. In fact no term associated with decay sounded nice with an ‘ology’ attached to it. The best I could come up with was ‘decadentology’ something like: the study of processes decadency (fortunately for everyone I did not use the term in the book). But behind the frivolousness associated with trying to create a concept like this, there was a serious conviction that there is a need for a concept that means: the study of all the internal and external forces that accelerate or decelerate the way things decay, decompose, degenerate, disintegrate and are replaced by other life forms. For there was no doubnt that the book offered such a generalised analytical perspective by showing that it has multiple applications. A ‘decadentology’ was useful whether we are dealing with natural and physical environments like forests or buildings, or we are dealing with social collectives like families, villages or nations. Last but not least, it was also clearly relevant when examining individual entities such as the human body. It was not surprising that I found myself thinking my experience of accelerated ageing from this decadentological perspective (I promise I’ll keep the usage of this term to an absolute minimum).
What immediately came to my mind when I began thinking my ageing from this perspective is that the human body is before all else subjected to varying processes of endo-decay. At the biological level bodily ageing is an irreversible process of cellular and molecular deterioration that ultimately leads to death. But just as there are differences in the pace of bodily decay between a human and a dog that have to do with inherent properties of the body of each, there are also differences between the rates of decay of human bodies, associated for example with sex and ethnicity and that have to do with genetic properties inherent to the body itself, even if these inter-human differences are less dramatic than inter-speciesist ones. At the same time the body is subjected to forms of exo-decay caused by social and environmental factors such as rural/urban locations and the degrees of pollution in the atmosphere that come with such locations. Then, there are dietary factors linked to class and ethnic factors and that affect both endo- and exo-processes of decay.
The more I thought about the above the more I wondered: is it not the case that an important dimension of medical studies is before all else a decadentology of the body? a study of the processes that affect its pace of decay. At the same time, medicine, both as a practice of looking after individual bodies and as a politics of public health dealing with populations, is of the order of bodily maintenance. Its success is measured not only by the quality of life it ensures but the degree to which it is able to decelerate the process of bodily decay. It is with all of the above in mind that I began to increasingly try and think the various social processes that COVID and the public health policies aimed at protecting us from it have unleashed in decadentological terms. Most are obvious, but I found it worthwhile to consider them in terms of a dynamic of acceleration of bodily decay and ageing.
Perhaps, given the sensitivities associated with discussion of lockdowns and restrictions of all kind, I should stress that I am not listing these to moan and invite sympathy or pity, nor to consider them more important than the need to be protected from COVID-19 (far from me to think that), nor to invite sarcasm and to have people mansplain me about how frivolous they are compared to the problems faced by others. I am well aware of the relative unimportance of some of them. My primary intent as I have made clear is to illustrate the decadentological way of thinking I have described above and its consequences.
There is no doubt that the pandemic has led to increased level of stress. One can intuitively accept that stress leads to an acceleration of bodily decay. How it does so is a more medically specialised question, but one can take it for granted that the causes of stress abound in the shadow of COVID. There is of course the stress that comes from the fear of catching the virus, or a more vulnerable family member or friend catching it. This clearly varies according to age and according to one’s general health, and the health of the people we surround ourselves with. It can be said that the pandemic makes for a less secure sense of permanency in social relations. We go to sleep less confident that the vulnerable people we know will still be with us when we wake up in the morning. This feeling is initially exhausting but when it gets routinised it becomes an ongoing but unrecognisable tension that hammers and wears out the body. It manifests itself in a variety of ways: increased worrying, short temper, etc…
There is also the stress that comes from the necessity of social distancing and in many cases the need for intermittent self-isolation. Along with this is the accompanying stress that comes from having to wear masks and from the prohibition of bodily contact in the process of greeting friends and kin. As with the above, the degree of stress this can cause varies a lot according to class, gender, sexuality, cultural background and many other things. Personally, I can definitely relate to a sense of hug-deprivation when meeting friends and I find having to do the ritualistic alternative of touching elbows mildly painful. Clearly this is not the case for a person who is not into hugging in the first place: a person who prefers the more bodily restrained handshake, let alone a Japanese person who’s into bowing.
The process of individualisation that social distancing and self-isolation orders encourage can have a very pronounced impact on those who have a more mutualist sense of their selves. Anthropologists know all too well that there are many people who don’t experience the health of their individual body in isolation from its connection with other bodies of friends and kin. This is not just about how such people ‘think’ about themselves, so it is not about asking them to ‘think’ differently for a while. It is more a fact of life: this is how they are and how life is experienced in an interconnected manner. The singularised, individuated body that Western medicine privileges as an object of policy, and that it isolates as it tries to keep it healthy, can, for many, be the source of decline in health when isolated in this manner and deprived of the network of other bodies it co-exists with. While this mutualism is the dominant norm in some cultures, it is nevertheless present in minor ways in all cultures. WE feel it when we are deprived of seeing our children or our parents or our close friends.
In much the same way, the enforced nuclearization of the family, and the normalisation of the single familial house mode of inhabitance can be seen as stress-inducing for people who are more used to living in extended family settings and moving on a daily basis between several households. Here we are dealing with more than just stress. Such nuclearization has practical and dietary consequences that can be easily seen as decay-accelerating forces.
In Australia especially, another cause of tension is the inability to travel and leave the country. For many people who see the viability of their lives in transnational terms, this seclusion intensifies the inherent tension that comes from an always existing sense of international isolation that is part of living in Australia: the so-called ‘tyranny of distance’. Again, this affects some more than others. Generally, the more grounded in a transnational diasporic network people are the harder their experience of enforced national isolation will be.
Related to the above but somewhat different is the stress that comes merely from being still and stuck whether in one’s 5km zone or in one’s city or in Australia, as opposed to being able to move around. As someone who, because of the nature of their work, spends a considerable part of the year travelling around the world I have found this particular difficult to deal with. As the Arab nomadic poet has it: ‘move and be fresh like the running water, or like still water you’ll putrefy.”
Are all of the above enough to make for an experience of accelerated decay and increased sense of social ageing? Even if it is the case, I am sure there are other features that I am not aware of that make for an experience of decelerated decay in pandemic times: I know that some enjoy the general slowing down of things for instance. Even so, the above question has more than a mere individual importance. Is it possible that the public health measures that are aimed at both protecting individual bodies from catching the virus and at minimising the effect of the virus on the general population are in fact also leading to accelerated bodily decay at least for some? Nonetheless, even if this was indeed the case, it is not clear whether something can be done about it except perhaps being aware of it as a limitation. For it would be ironic if the public health policies implemented and enforced to protect our lives are making us die more quickly.
[i] Ghassan Hage (ed), Decay, Duke University Press: 2021.
