Core Response #3 (Week 5)

Reading Beaztriz Colomina’s piece was an intellectually stimulating experience, as I never thought about incorporating war/military rhetoric into the domestic space. Focusing on the impact of WWII on modern architecture and domesticity in the US in the 1950s, Colomina points out that everything on the domestic front can trace its lineage to the military effort. For example, a thorough control over the domestic space bears similarity to a carefully orchestrated campaign. The Underground Home project – in which the owner has complete authority over his/her surrounding environment – is described as “a place where he controls his own world – a world of total ease and comfort, of security, safety and above all, privacy.” However, in the presence of the Cold War, or more specifically, in the face of nuclear danger, seeking ease, comfort, security, safety, and privacy in an underground space sounds like escapism. Yet, such a vision, somehow implying a sense of escape or refuge, is not tenable as it encounters the collapse of boundaries between inside and outside. “Now the public has invaded the interior … The enemy is always within” (19). Colomina's article, surprisingly, connects with my recurring thoughts on the current outbreak of novel coronavirus in China, although the nature of this recent event varies greatly from that of her object of study. To put it simply, with the outbreak of the coronavirus, the domestic space in China suddenly turns into a battlefield. Sitting at home is also a fight.

First, domestic hygiene has been imbued with extensive meaning. Frequent cleaning and disinfection play an important role in this “battle” against the non-human enemy. Mask and disinfecting water become life necessities and the ideal of keeping home clean functions as a weapon for winning this campaign. What you do in the domestic space is not a matter of personal choice but an indispensable part of this battle with lasting and profound meaning as to (maybe that’s a bit of exaggeration) whether victory will occur. Besides, rules and regulations concerning the connection between inside and outside are issued and implemented. For example, in the neighborhood where my parents live, every day only one member of the family is allowed to go out – and solely for the purpose of buying life necessities. Rather than separating the domestic space from the outside, such control over people’s daily traveling further attests to the indivisibility of inside and outside. It is precisely because the outside, now implying danger and precarity, can so easily intrude into the inside, now both a refuge and a prison, that it is more feasible to exert control over human beings -- when compared with taking efforts to control the non-human aspects. And as we are fighting against the virus which can spread through the air, any spatial boundary drawn by human beings evokes a feeling of losing control.

Meanwhile, individuals confined at home are continually absorbing conflicting images via screens. On the one hand, mainstream media continues to feed them images featuring spectacles – most of them are positive publicity such as newly-built hospitals taking in more patients. Yet in this digital age, the influence of television screen is greatly challenged by that of smaller, and more democratic screens, such as smartphones, where a multitude of images -- whether positive or negative, whether from the government or from the civilians – proliferate. And there exists another kind of intrusion into the domestic space, a much more direct kind. If a person is infected, images and videos of his or her recent activities in the neighborhood and of his or her home space are often both posted and circulated on social media and printed and stuck on conspicuous places in the neighborhood to warn the neighbors not to get closer. If a person is suspected of being infected, medical workers come to his or her home every day to take his or her temperature and every action he or she makes is strictly monitored. The lines between watching the screen and being on the screen are far more blurred as images of the interior are problematized – although they are concerned with the domestic space since we are in the waging of war against a non-human enemy dismissive of the spatial boundary, they have been requisitioned as weaponry.  

My thoughts deviate from the subject matter of Colomina's article -- modern architecture --since I am not quite familiar with that field, while her writing inspires me to think further about the relationship between domesticity and war -- in a broader sense. Indeed, in today’s society, war takes place not only on the real battlefield but also in aerospace, in cyberspace and even … in hospital. And if we believe in the concept of Anthropocene, chances are high that ... we will be fighting against the non-human.