The Nomad in Situ, or, the Man of the Crowd in the Time of COVID

Abstract

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• The Nomad in Situ, or, the Man of the Crowd in the Time of COVID
• Robert T. Tally Jr. (bio)

The emergence of the global pandemic and ongoing COVID-19 crisis has fostered a profound and personal awareness of space and place, such that one's apprehension of one's place in space is perhaps all the more real than it may have seemed a year or two earlier. That is, everyday life under the effects of COVID-19 has become marked with a sense of place, as thousands or millions of individual subjects found themselves facing stay-at-home orders, lockdowns, quarantines, curfews, closures, travel restrictions, and the now ubiquitous concept of social distancing, a phrase that quite literally draws our attention to one's "place" relative to that of others, right down to maintaining a space of six feet between ourselves and our fellow humans. What Heidegger called "the They" seems all the more ominous in this respect, and the Angst he identified with the Unheimlich or "uncanny" and with "not being at home" ("nichts-zu-Hause-sein") takes on new resonances as well, when people are being anxiously reminded to stay at home, a rather uncanny state to be in, or else being warned to keep our distance when in the public spaces of the agora. Our most homely settings are all the more unheimlich today, and the familiar space of one's apartment or house seems now truly uncanny for so many people.

In my Topophrenia: Place, Narrative, and the Spatial Imagination and elsewhere, I have suggested that the experience of being lost is probably the condition under which we are most viscerally aware of space and place. The Angst-ridden disorientation, fear, and dread that comes with not knowing where we are and how to get to where we want to be: this makes us all too conscious of our place, or perhaps our displacement, in space. But for many living in the COVID era the experience of spatial limitation, of being forced to stay in one's place or to restrict one's movements to a specified number or type of relatively familiar, known places, carries with it a powerful sense [End Page 79] of our spatiality and our situatedness in space, with similar levels of anxiety. The places where we find ourselves located are not at all unfamiliar, especially when we are literally staying "at home," but the situation is changed. Home is no longer quite so homely, and this is a profoundly "unsettling" experience.

Here I should add, parenthetically but significantly, due recognition of all those people for whom working from home is and was not an option. I am hopeful, though not very confident, that one result of the pervasive COVID-19 crisis and its aftermath will be for more and more people to recognize the vital importance of those workers in what have been labeled "essential" jobs, and I wish that such awareness would translate into greater pay and benefits to those working in these dangerous environments, even after the pandemic is declared to be at an end. Healthcare workers, doctors, nurses, and hospital staff are rightly receiving public acknowledgment in the US media, but I am also thinking especially of grocery clerks, convenience store employees, gas station attendants, mail carriers, delivery workers, and many more like them. I would also mention that, as a flipside to the "work from home" model that so many have been able to take advantage of, there are many millions staying at home involuntarily, who have been fired, laid off, rendered redundant, and so on. And there is an excellent chance that many of those jobs will not return in whatever a post-COVID world looks like. These, too, are among the nomads of the present epoch.

Immobility breeds its own demons, and the sense of being "settled," broadly conceived, is ominous. Yet as Gilles Deleuze has affirmed, "the nomad is not necessarily one who moves: some voyages take place in situ." In Edgar Allan Poe's famous tale of a wandering subject, "The Man of the Crowd," we also find such a nomadic practice in connection with the more familiar mobility of the...