The Co-Ontological Securities of Gated Lifeworlds: Atmospheres and Foamed Immunologies Under Late Modernity

The paper takes a closer look at The Villages – one of the largest retirement (and gated) communities on the world. Situated in the state of Florida, The Villages is an all-white, Christian and predominantly Republican and Trump-voting community where people come from all parts of the United States not only to collect their dividends of the American Dream to which many of them feel entitled, but also to physically and psychologically transport themselves into a more nostalgic, neighbourly, joyful, patriotic, recognisable and safer version of America. While still heterotopical in essence, retirement leisure communities such as The Villages are no longer spaces of deviation; they have become thoroughly incorporated into the political economies of desire and amusement and, aided by the more recent trends in community-building through the use of detachment, enclosure and climatisation, that is, through the creation of comprehensive and compact affective lifeworlds and atmospheres of belonging, also of ontological or vernacular security. However, one man’s or one whole community’s dream life may become a neighbour’s nightmare. The production of ontological security for some may yield ontological insecurities for others. Since the atmospheres of ontological security are never perfectly hermetically sealed and coexist with other neighbouring ‘bubbles’ of climatised being in a state of co-dependency and even co-fragility, they are always influenced by developments elsewhere. And while ontological multiplicity, especially under the context of the increasingly fragmented contemporary world that has been shaken with the dislocations of modernity, is widely acknowledged in the literature, the (atmospheric) impact of ontological bubbles onto other and neighbouring spheres of secured being is severely understudied and the conceptual and theoretical language for it underdeveloped. This paper returns to the existentialist roots of ontological security theory (OST) and proposes a phenomenological re-reading of ontological security through the theoretical language of spherology and immunology in order to bring OST into a more substantive engagement with the spatial and immunological realities and practices of the globalising world. Departing from the work of Peter Sloterdijk, the article advances three principal claims. Firstly, it shows that under the spatio-immunological dislocations of late modernity, the processes of ontological security are better understood as matters of ‘co-ontological security’, reflecting the highly relational and co-dependent character by which human lifeworlds are organised and juxtaposed. Secondly, it explores the ways in which technologies and life-support systems of ontological security may have negative ramifications for the ontological integrities of other neighbouring lifeworlds. And lastly, the article investigates the autoimmunological processes that are at work in all immunological systems and that are capable of turning the mechanisms of ontological security into the very sources of insecurity. In exploring these themes, the paper examines The Villages to show how protected living in an expanding and gated lifestyle community produces the very conditions of ontological insecurity for the self and for others.