Airborne:
Air as a Social Medium
Eva Horn
“Air is not only a medium of the physical life of humans, animals and plants. It is also a medium of society. To socialize with someone means not only to breathe the same air, but also to occupy the same atmosphere as they do[...] Air is society, society is the shared experience of ‘being in the air.”
Volume One, Issue One, “Atmosphere,” Essay
Color copper engraving of Doctor Schnabel [i.e Dr Beak], a plague doctor in seventeenth-century Rome, published by Paul Fürst, ca. 1656, Source.
Air has long been associated with health and disease. Affirming this, we need look no further than the disquieting images of seventeenth-century plague doctors, whose unsettling, beak-like masks were thought to protect their wearers from the dangers of miasma, “bad air.” In “Airborne: Air as a Social Medium,” Eva Horn acknowledges the ways in which we proceed with this same line of thought today, in the midst of an airborne pandemic, and how we now use — or disuse — factual science to uphold our systemic, social beliefs. Looking specifically at the effects of COVID-19 on media and interpersonal communication, Horn cautions us to remember that air, as a topic of discussion, also serves as a vessel for society’s ills. Unlike plague doctors, we can not wave a wand through the breeze and pray for the dissipation of pathogens — whether politically, economically, or in terms of our collective health, we have no choice but to breathe in the social atmosphere around us.
- The Editors
Since antiquity, it has been the winds that bring disease. In Hippocrates’s writings on epidemics, certain kinds of winds were said to transport particular varieties of fever. According to Hippocratic medicine, the seasons and the particular courses they take — whether it be a markedly cold or excessively mild winter, for example — were responsible for the prevalence of certain sicknesses in a region. And there was of course the widely held belief that the local climate could be either beneficial or harmful to one’s health. For centuries and across many different cultures, it has been the air that was thought to bring disease. In traditional Chinese medicine, fever is referred to as shangfeng, which means “injured by the wind,” and in Indonesian the term for a cold is masuk angin, or “the wind has entered.” In Europe, people believed for centuries that the soil, and in particular wet areas like bogs or stagnant waters, were the source of foul and harmful gases. In the cities, sewage canals, cesspools, tanneries, and even cemeteries were suspected of spreading disease with their stench.
And so, long before the air pollution of today, the air was the subject of the worst health fears. It contained the evaporations of the earth, and other bodies, the by-products of putrefaction processes (so-called “miasmas” or “exhalations”), flakes of skin, small stones, plants, sweat, dust, insect larvae, pollen, seeds, fats, gases, steam, sulfur, salts, ash, and much more. Neither in the city nor the country were you thought to be safe from these vapors, which is why there was a flood of advice on how to protect yourself from them: the frequent airing out of a room (or precisely not), fragrant essences to be held under the nose, not sleeping facedown, allowing the north winds into your house but by no means the south winds. The Sirocco, it was thought, could trigger contagious disease, insanity, and outbreaks of violent crime. The air, by this regard, not only carries diseases from human to human (as today we know). The wind itself was seen as a pathogen.
As outdated as these medical theories may sound, they express something that still holds true today: air is not only a medium of the physical life of humans, animals, and plants. It is also a medium of society.
In Adalbert Stifter’s short story, “Granit,” written in the middle of the nineteenth century, we read of the plague: “We do not know where it came from: Did people bring it with them, did it come in the mild spring air, or have winds and rainclouds brought it? No matter, it has come...”
SARS CoV-2 is an airborne pathogen, as we know from the crash course on epidemiology conveyed to us by the media and politics.
On the contrary, pandemics quite often cause the dissolution of every rule and regularity, including social ones. They are a completely different type of catastrophe from earthquakes, floods, or even war. In these cases, disaster sociology has observed, societies often come together in a spirit of spontaneous solidarity, which while fragile and often fleeting, can for the moment create an uplifting, productive energy. People survive because they help each other. Rebecca Solnit described this phenomenon as “A Paradise Built in Hell,” a groundswell of social closeness, pragmatism, and individual heroism.
It is an irony of history that through the radical reduction of air traffic, automobile and industrial emissions, and not least of all the sharp drop in production of goods of all kinds, air quality has suddenly improved worldwide. In China, the levels of harmful particulate matter fell by 25% during the shutdown. Some cities saw blue skies for the first time in 20 years.
Climate change, and the numerous other massive changes to the earth system which we now summarize under the keyword Anthropocene (species extinction, land use, the ozone hole, ocean acidification, changes in the phosphorous and nitrogen cycle, toxins in the environment and much more) is, as I wrote some years ago, an imperceptible catastrophe without event.
However, this social and economic existence of ours — as travelers, workers, or consumers — was one that, in turn, by way of climate change, air pollution, and the ozone hole, affected precisely that medium which it is based on: the air. The COVID crisis disrupts not only economic life, but also the rapidly accelerating, yet imperceptible process of climate change. It forces us to pause, to break through routines and the lack of alternatives. It is — for good and for bad — a testing laboratory of political contingency. Now we see: everything can be different. For a brief and uncanny moment, the imperative of economic growth, the laws of the labor market, the necessity of working to the point of burnout, the inevitability of mass consumption and travel — all of that has proven to be optional. There are alternatives to them. Maybe in this way, COVID-19 provides an opportunity for reflection and change, and for training our sense of possibility. Before the crisis, any significant carbon tax was deemed inconceivable in most European countries, and, as we had repeatedly heard, with a view to the economy or the transport sector, “impossible to implement.” And this despite the fact that, e.g. a carbon tax has been successfully implemented in British Columbia and Sweden.
COVID-19 will continue to change our lives long after we are all immune, or dead. Perhaps this pandemic is a wicked, bitter ruse, a revenge of the air. It reminds us that it is a medium, a medium of life, but also of being social. The most individual, intimate necessity of breathing connects us both to a pandemic and to the planet’s atmosphere. Yet, the consequences of climate change will make the effects of COVID-19 pale in comparison — but maybe only for our grandchildren. Whereas climate change — despite it being a known fact for 40 years — has only marginally managed to become a matter of concern, an occasion for radical measures and an internationally coordinated political effort, COVID-19 has at least achieved the former in one brutal, previously unimaginable coup. It is teaching us a lesson — and not only about inadequate disaster protection, the disadvantages of just-in-time production and globalized supply chains, the lack of political foresight, an idiotic skepticism of science, and our fragile healthcare systems. COVID-19 also reminds us of our political, economic, and individual scope of action. Once we return — and hopefully soon — to the social space of being together in the air, once we are back together at a table dining with friends and discussing with colleagues, we will have to put this lesson into practice. Until then: hold your breath.
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Translated by Peter Rigney
Eva Horn is a Professor of German literature and cultural studies at the University of Vienna. She is the founder of the Vienna Anthropocene Network and author of The Future as Catastrophe (2018).
- Eva Horn, “Air as Medium,” Grey Room 73 (Autumn 2018): 6–25.
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- Bruno Latour, “Why has Critique Run Out of Steam: From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry 30, (Winter 2004): 225–248. ↩
- Adalbert Stifter, “Granit,” in: ders., Bunte Steine [1853], Stuttgart 1994, p. 33. ↩
- Neeltje van Doremalen, Trenton Bushmaker and Dylan H. Morris, “Aerosol and Surface Stability of SARS-CoV-2 as Compared with SARS-CoV-1,” Letter to the Editor, New England Journal of Medicine (17 March 2020): n.p. ↩
- Andrew Freedman and Jason Samenow, “Coronavirus may have a seasonal cycle, but that
doesn’t mean it will go away this summer, experts warn,”Washington Post, 11 March 2020; [online]: Click here for article ↩
- Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell, (New York and London: 2009). ↩
- Stifter, “Granit,” p. 34. ↩
- Amy Maxmen, “How the Fight Against Ebola Tested a Culture’s Traditions,”
National Geographic, 20 Jan. 2015. ↩
- Lauren Summer, “Why China's Air Has Been Cleaner During The Coronavirus Outbreak,” NPR, 4 March 2020. ↩
- Eva Horn, The Future as Catastrophe. Disaster Imagination in the Modern Age, (New York: 2018). On the Anthropocene see Eva Horn and Hannes Bergthaller, Anthropocene – Key Issues for the Humanities (New York/Oxon: 2020). ↩
- Several concrete examples have long proven that it is possible, and that it even works well.
See Government of British Columbia:
[British Columbia’s Carbon Tax],
Click here for article ↩