The Lockdown Body: how the world fell apart and how we built it back up

In this piece, I choose to discuss the COVID-19 pandemic through the lens of ‘lockdown bodies’. I draw on phenomenological theory to argue that bodies are central to people’s conceptions of the world, their selves and time. By physically removing bodies from the world, lockdown regulations have disrupted these conceptions and the world has “fallen apart”. It was only through the invention of new ‘bodily rituals’ that people were able to resolve this dissonance and build the world back up.

“Ils ne mourraient pas tous, mais tous étaient frappés”

 – La Fontaine, 1678

As COVID-19 posed a viral threat, government measures chose to keep (non-essential) bodies apart, each locked in their homes. Minds however were still able to connect with other minds through the digital world. Potentially for the first time in the history of humanity, bodies and minds were not living in the same reality: bodies confined to a single space, minds able to roam the digital world and find each other.

I would like to discuss here the consequences this split might have had on people’s conceptions of the world, themselves and the passing of time; and mainly highlight the importance of the body in these three instances. In order to cope will all of these disruptions, I argue that people have had to re-align their bodies and their minds through new rituals, so they could once again exist in the same reality. Lockdown periods have highlighted how little we consider the body under “normal”, non-pandemic circumstances and prompted us to reconsider the importance of bodily techniques in enabling us to navigate the world. I hope the importance of the body remains at the forefront of people’s minds as we move into a post-COVID world and negotiate interactions with virtual realities.

The importance of the body in our conception of the world

Since Descartes, it is widely accepted in Europe that the world is perceived through the mind. Through methodological doubt, he rejects information from his bodily senses and reaches the conclusion that the only certainty he has is his mind’s ability to doubt. The distinction between subject and world is something the field of phenomenology questions. In his theory of intentionality, Husserl remarks that consciousness is always about something and cannot exist independently of the object is it conscious of (McIntyre & Smith, 1989). Heidegger later fleshes out the idea of ‘being-in-the-world’ or dasein. He argues that subject and object are interdependent and that we conceive the world through our direct and embodied experience of it (Gorner, 2007). In Being and Time, Heidegger therefore argues that the human experience of being comes before thought, through the body first.

As bodies are locked at home, people are forced to live in their minds more. They spend more time on social media reaching out to other minds. They rethink their jobs, their relationships, their lives. They turn inwards since they can no longer turn outwards. The consequences are easy to guess. Mental health plummeted. Apathy rose, depression too. I argue these statistic are a reflection of importance of existing in our bodies, more than a reflection on how bad social media is. Anthropology has shown that people experience the world through their bodies. Furthermore, the field has argued that some of this experience can only exist in the body and does not translate into rational thoughts: they call it ‘knowledge of the body’.

In his brilliant ethnography of a boxing gym in 1969 Harlem, Wacquant shows how some knowledge cannot be translated into words, but rather must be acquired and understood personally through practice, through the body. As he seeks advice on how to throw better punches and avoid his opponent’s attacks, his coach DeeDee answers firmly “you can’t tell. You can talk abou’ it, but it don’t work” (Wacquant, 2004:78). There is no rational, intellectual shortcut to learning how to box, only practice seems to do the trick. Wacquant relates this experience to the theories put forward by Mauss concerning knowledge produced by the body as opposed to by the mind. In his reflections on the knowledge carried through the body, Mauss uses the word habitus to describe acquired bodily practices, or techniques (Mauss, 1973). Detailing how all of our bodily practices are acquired by mimesis, he reaches a conclusion that “there is perhaps no ‘natural way’ for the adult” (Mauss, 1973:74).

Experience of the world cannot be reduced to a cognitive one.

So, according to these observations, we need to exist bodily in the world in order to conceive it. What new rituals were invented during lockdown to cope with this loss of interaction? Well, instead of “being-in-the-world”, as Heidegger theorised, we had to “be-in-the-digital-world”. Indeed, many people coped by escaping into gaming worlds (Balhara et al., 2020). Virtual reality (VR) games, although still a small part of the gaming landscape, were increasingly used during lockdown (Siani & Marley, 2011). In contrast to console gaming, they brought the experience of the world into our living rooms and required our bodies to move around – creating maybe a form of ‘virtual dasein’? Furthermore, this study shows improvements of mental health for VR users, probably through a combination of factors including increased fitness.

As we have seen, the body is necessary for our ability to conceptualise the world, and during a time of prolonged lockdown, virtual reality offered a world accessible from our living rooms, that we could experience (almost) with our bodies.

The importance of the body in the construction of the self

Another important disruption resulting from lockdown policies was a loss of sense of self. Indeed, during lockdown with bodies having to stay home, social roles were heavily disrupted. Lui and colleagues stress that “social roles are fundamental to people’s sense of self” (2021:1).

In addition, self-continuity is difficult to maintain when time itself was also dependent on social roles (Lui et al., 2021). This can result in people feeling inauthentic, and therefore losing their sense of selves. One way to palliate this sense of inauthenticity, according to this study, is to increase focus on the present moment, in order to recreate some form of continuity of the self, in order words, adopting a present-focused temporality. Indeed, studies have shown that too much time spent on social media can actually lead to emotional detachment and loss of self (Au & Chew, 2017). Similarly, the overwhelmingness of news updates was identified as a cause for the rise in anxiety and depression during lockdown (Ahmed, 2020).

With this in mind, people started reading the news less, focussing on the present moment, trying to spend time away from their phones. They turned to the body to regain a sense of self: they changed their hair colour, stopped wearing pyjamas everyday and made an effort to put together an outfit. In the early days of lockdown, some people (famously) started baking bread at home and posting in on social media; some argue to show they were being productive during this time and “winning” at quarantine (Mohabeer, 2021). However this social identity did not last long as the lockdown extended. Many people also questioned how much they identified with their jobs. The Great Resignation, or The Big Quit, saw millions of people resigning each month, as they looked for more meaningful careers and companies whose values they could identify with (Morgan, 2022).

As we have seen, our sense of self is highly correlated with our ability to narrativise our lives on a continuous timeline. However, as we will now address, policies of lockdown have altered our sense of time, and disrupted our ability to place ourselves in a timeline of events. To the people who experienced lockdowns, these periods fell almost outside of time, they felt liminal.

The importance of the body in our perception of time

We all have Schrodinger’s Virus now.

Because we cannot get tested, we can’t know whether we have the virus or not.

We have to act as if we have the virus so that we don’t spread it to others.

We have to act as if we’ve never had the virus because if we didn’t have it, we’re not immune.

Therefore, we both have and don’t have the virus.

Thus, Schrodinger’s Virus.

If you don’t understand this joke, you’re never allowed to talk about science again.

Internet meme (Kim et al., 2020)

As illustrated by this joke, the COVID pandemic was a very ambiguous period of time. All having to act as if our bodies carried the virus so as to not infect others, but also acting as if we never had it and were therefore not immune to it ourselves. A period so ambiguous in fact that some anthropologists have described it as a liminal period – applying the concept from Victor Turner’s Ritual Process (1977).

Indeed, taking inspiration from Van Gennep’s rites of passage, Turner describes liminality as a space in-between, “neither here nor there”, a transitional space between two stable states. This definition seems quite fitting of the lockdown experience. We can equate the separation stage of the ritual process to the implementation of lockdown policies (we were quite literally separated from each other and from the outside world), the liminal stage as the lockdown period during which, as we have seen above, our conceptions of ourselves and the world were uprooted; and argue that vaccinations constituted the final re-incorporation phase.  

However, I would argue that lockdown was not quite liminal since liminal states are supposed to be transitory and not fixed. One striking feature of lockdown in contrast is that it seemed infinite. As first supposed to last only two weeks, it extended into months and eventually years. “Time has slowed to a crawl. The days are a blur. Two weeks ago feels like two years ago” (Holman & Grisham, 2020). People were stuck in a ambiguous, uncertain, unstable state (so liminal in this sense) with no end in sight: the name coined was Quarantime. Rebecca Irons describes it through the Marxist notion of time-space compression (Irons, 2020). Initially created as a critique to (post)modernity, the term describes how technological advancements have redefined the relationship of time to space. Irons tells the history of how production moved away from being task-based into being clock-based, and how clock-time then became commodified. During periods of lockdown, time became meaningless as it was no longer linked to physical spaces we had to be in. She uses the term time-space compression to explain how video call technologies collapsed the notions of space and time: with facetime enabling us to be in two places at once, and with zoom calls collapsing the office and the home.

To accommodate and exit this liminal quarantime state, people had to invent their own rituals of re-incorporation, rituals that involved their bodies. They started physically separating their spaces of office and home, to "decompress” time and space. Others created a separation between work and life by going on a walk in the morning or exercising at 6pm to mark the end of the work-day. Employees were told to shut their laptops down on Friday night to mark the week-end. These new bodily rituals (re)created a sense of time, by having the body move through physical space.

“If this pandemic is teaching us anything, it is that we need to return to our bodies” (Kourlas, 2020).

Lockdowns have shown us the importance of our bodies in building our conceptions of the world, of ourselves and of a sense of time. Successful rituals of adaptations were the ones involving the body. The pandemic has reminded us that existing only in our minds is damaging, and hopefully prompted us to rethink the place of our bodies in non-pandemic contexts. It seems we have collectively realised that social media does not replace real-life socialising, that work is best done in the office and that mental health is intrinsically linked to physical health. I hope these findings will be brought to the limelight as we collectively recover from the COVID-19 pandemic and envison more powerful digital technologies.

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