UNCANNY IN THE AIR. INDOOR/OUTDOOR IN ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS

The extraordinary social times imposed by the covid19 event has constituted the first traumatic and collective experience of the Anthropocene. Patterns of accelerated environmental changes reveal to be consequences of extractivism and environmental relation of the carbon economy. Indeed, interspecies passage are consequence not just of our agribusiness mode of production, but of our cosmology of naturalism, where "nature" has been positioned as external uncanny actor. The short circuit of our symbolic structures in understanding the world has amplified with a polarization between inside/outside, at the heart of carbon economy and of fossil greenhouse effect, in a dramatic lack of metaphors of relatedness between human and nonhuman subjects. The dualism of culture/nature has been amplified by an historical dissociation between earth and sky in our environmental imagination, where covid19 has emerged as terror in the air, in a dichotomy between indoor/outdoor. The symbolic structure of the air has been translated into an insignificant, detached and invisible field: social dynamics already at stake within social and cultural dynamics of climate changes as a social denial of significant social relations with what comes from the air or from "outside". What prevails is a dispositive of immunization from outside or from the "foreign", at stake in the last decades in defending ourselves from what merely becomes an outside menace for the community, out of patterns of relatedness. But cultures have always been atmospheric, since they have invested, accorded symbolic meanings, domesticated and inhabited and made sense to their exposure to atmosphere and to environmental web and entanglements.