Encapsulation: Inner Worlds and Their Discontents

In 1896, the Portuguese writer Joaquim Oliveira Martins reflected on a fogbound stay in an English country house. The English “gather themselves up within themselves,” he noted, “they contract themselves, they roll themselves up like snails in their shells” (76). Their “civilization,” he continued, “consist[s] in” an “artificial structure,” involving “kitchens like laboratories,” “cupboards full of boots of different kinds for each moment of existence,” and “sticks for every kind of walk” (76). Like contemporaneous fictional characters such as Verne’s Captain Nemo and Huysmans’s Des Esseintes, these individuals seemed to have withdrawn into encapsulated, cluttered worlds. Walter Benjamin would later elaborate on private shells, in which one “secluded oneself within a spider’s web” (216). “From this cavern,” he concluded, “one does not like to stir” (216). Peter Sloterdijk has recently argued that “on the threshold of advanced civilization . . . the artificial, sealed inner world can, under certain circumstances, become the only possible environment for its inhabitants” (Globes 237). This retreat into capsules has had significant technological, sociological, ecological and phenomenological consequences. Capsules have become the ubiquitous life-space for billions of humans in the developed and developing world. Human livingspace has become a giant apparatus within which encapsulated beings are fed, watered, mobilized, entertained, and maintained in states of historically-unprecedented bodily comfort. This apparatus is often called the technosphere (Haff; Zalasiewicz et al., “Scale and Diversity”). Conceptually grasping the technosphere necessitates the adoption of a multi-scalar analytical framework which operates at several spatial levels from the intimate worlds of humans to the unfolding planetary wreckage wrought by mass encapsulated existence. It also requires the analytic capacity to shift back and forth between scales and to appreciate the material effects of scale in complex systems (Coen, West). In this essay, I outline a fivefold scalar structure: equipment, capsules, networks, anthromes and anthropogenic sinks. This essay predominantly focuses on the second scale: capsules. It argues that multidisciplinary analysis is essential to bring out the historical, material, cultural and existential complexity of the process of encapsulation. Brief as it is, the analysis draws on literature, history and philosophy as well as evolutionary biology, geology, environmental science and cognitive archaeology. The essay begins with a historical account of capsules and their climates, before sketching the larger scales of the technosphere: networks, anthromes, and anthropogenic sinks. It then provides an account of the material transition unfolding alongside the development of encapsulation, and concludes by situating these various phenomena within a deep historical and evolutionary context.