Bunkers, Biodomes, and Borders: “Fortress America” at Home

• In Event: Trumpism, Christian Nationalism, and Rightwing Revanchism

Abstract

This paper is an extension of a broader research program of “bunkerization,” which I theorize as an orientation to the world that eschews collective action in favor of individuated, consumption-driven responses to perceived risks. A bunkerized society thus has subjects who prepare to last through the worst-case scenario through shaping their domestic lives, consumption patterns, and home securitization as a matter of bunkering down. Even though backyard bunkers may be odd Cold War artifacts, I argue that bunkerization is a process of transforming the political sphere that turns collective action problems into individualized responses, facilitated by mass consumption. Prior work established this phenomenon as having roots in the development of American politics. Namely, anxieties over industrialization, mass migration, and westward expansion fueled a politics of preparedness that predates the Cold War or the current popularization of “prepping” in the United States. This shows that rather than being an aberrant behavior, prepping is an increasingly mainstream consumer activity with deep roots in the American development of mass consumption.
The current phase of this project continues with a focus the spatial arrangements that result from bunkerization in everyday life. To make this case the paper uses the idea of “Fortress America” to show the spatial arrangements of bunkerization that are unique to the United States. This conception of Fortress America will be laid out in three vectors with a theoretical analysis that expands the concept and links them together in the politics of bunkerization. First, in terms of a belligerent and isolationist foreign policy, Fortress America has been used as a term to discuss how the US might see itself as an international actor. This also stretches back into the early twentieth century, but xenophobic outbursts, security anxieties, and isolationist discourses produce a discourse of fortification that sees the border of the country as sacrosanct. Second, Fortress America provides a domestic imaginary, where what Kaplan calls “manifest domesticity” invites Americans to see themselves fortifying their home; a miniature Fortress America of bunkerized domiciles that hoard consumables, harden the home carapace, and use surveillance technologies. Third, even when looking at alternative futures, Fortress America still shapes these possibilities in terms of carapaces, distinct from the broader world. Here, biodomes, solarpunk farms, or even already existing structures like Arcosanti in Arizona show the limits of “good” bunkerization.
These three vectors will be theorized as a condition of the liberal insistence that bodies, boundaries, and borders are hard, fast, and inviolable. This critique will be made through integrating the work of Paul Virilio’s work on speed and politics, and how urbanity itself is tied up in liberal notions of fortification and uncrossable barriers. This paper will show how this spatalization of bunkerization shows the need to reconceive a politics beyond Fortress America, and invites a dialog with affect theory about how to theorize the body (physiological and politic), and how to “stay with the trouble” of collective action problems without retreating into the bunker.

Author

• Robert E. Kirsch, Arizona State University