The Anthropology of Toxicity

The I-10 is a peculiar beast. Its body stretches from coast to coast, it cuts through swamps and deserts, sometimes criss-crosses mountains and sometimes lies flat on its belly, while thousands of vehicles crawl upon its back. If it were not for the metaphor, however, it would be hard to think of it as a bounded object that can be perceived at once – it is too big and too many things happen on and along it. It is sublime maybe.

Konstantin: What did you think of Shapiro’s usage of the sublime?
Laurin: I liked it, but I wasn’t fully convinced.

This conversation happens in a car, traveling on the I-10 towards Houston on a weekday morning, a bit after sunrise. Voices are slow and drowsy, thoughts come slow and are often interrupted by the need to focus on the driving.

K: Me neither. I’m really not a fan of people taking two things that bear the same name and putting them together, as if language coincidence is an argument in itself. I understand that Kant wrote of the sublime and that there is a chemical term sublime, but why should they belong together? Why not bring in Freud’s sublime and sublimation as a process of invisible feelings and structures acquiring shape; sexual frustration taking the form of art or violence. This type of sublime, or sublimation, even mimics the chemical process: solids becoming gas, formaldehyde from the walls becoming a condition of the body. Why choose Kant’s sublime over this one?… Not that I know much of the former.

L: What I vaguely remember from my philosophy classes many years ago is that Immanuel Kant considered ‘natural’ events like storms and icebergs, but also the earthquake of Lisbon in 1755 and the Egyptian pyramids as sources for the inner development of sublime feelings. All these events and objects are too big and extensive for the grasp and understanding of a single human being. They overwhelm us. They threaten us. Given the fact that survival is indeed secured and our lives are not directly threatened, one can then find a rational capacity within ourselves that can withstand whatever ‘irrational’ or ‘overwhelming’ object we are coming to terms with.

K: In a way this is similar to what we talked about in class: in the formaldehyde case which Shapiro brings up, there isn’t an easily definable community of victims. It is indeed extremely hard and impossible to imagine such a community and the damage that is being inflicted upon it. However, I am not entirely convinced that this is a good enough reason to address the issue via the framework of the sublime. One could, for instance, turn to Timothy Morton’s idea of hyperobjects that are so immense in scale across time and space, that they baffle us and suspend our ability to perceive them rationally. And I think that there is a flirtation with the sublime here too since Morton often evokes Kant and the Kantian sublime, but he never embraces it. In fact, he says that hyperobjects are harder to imagine than the sublime, because the sublime is infinite while the hyperobjects are humongous and – to Morton at least – it is easier to think infinity rather than “a very large finitude”. I have the feeling that I simply lack enough philosophy background to understand how does that sublime map onto formaldehyde.

L: There is a lot of work on the sublime out there. Not that I have ever really dealt much with it, but I remember that, following Kant, but also his precursor Edmund Burke and his poetic successor Friedrich Schiller, the main precondition for a sublime feeling to occur is a safe and distanced spot from which to experience spectacular or horrifying events. Now, the category of the sublime, as an alternative branch of aesthetics, has strangely found its way into all these debates about waste, toxicity, and environments. Zygmunt Bauman and Brian Thill speak about a “waste sublime.” Joseph Masco calls it “nuclear sublime” and now Nick Shapiro introduces us to the “chemical sublime”. Shapiro has made a good point by saying that most of these composite terms hang heavy with “Enlightenment-era baggage.” In other words, this baggage entails a gendered middle-class logic of impermeability and security. By being removed and distanced, an environmental crisis, a natech disaster, a toxic spill, a waste dumpster, or a nuclear bomb, you name it, can be perceived simultaneously with fascination and repulsion. Shapiro then introduces his own new version of this sublime formula. For him, the chemical sublime consists of an awareness of bodily “irritations” that reach a particular threshold at which they get perceived as “agitations”. In many respects, the sublime shares characteristics with the sacred on the religious level as well.

K: The question of distance is super interesting when we speak of something that can actually penetrate the body. If we stick with the nuclear example for a while, it is really easy to track the various distances that come into play: you have the distance between the explosion and the one who presses the button on the nuclear site test or drops the bomb from the airplane. But you also have the distance between the bomb and survivors. And I think that there has to be a link between one’s distance from the explosion and their ability to think of it as a “sublime”. It is hard for me to think that a survivor would speak of the sublime and perverse fascination with the mushroom cloud, whereas I can imagine a scientist or a military general doing so. It is repulsion that links them, but fascination that divides them.
But then again, think of someone who was not too far away from Hiroshima or Nagasaki. This person survived the explosion from the distance, but has the effects of radiation in her flesh. So things get kind of conflated and I can’t help but go back to Morton’s hyperobjects again. You have something – radiation – that is too big to comprehend at once, if at all. Yet, sometimes your spatiotemporal way of being happens to be at the same scale with that of the hyperobject and you suddenly come into contact with it; you start carrying it in yourself even. I feel that this is similar to formaldehyde in general which exists out there and takes part in various industries, but only sometimes gets into contact with you. And then you’re marked.
I feel that the big issue here is not so much the distance between the object and the theorizing observer, but the fact that speaking of the sublime in relation to a certain object, say, formaldehyde, takes this object as a bounded thing that can be theorized and rips it away from the political and economic forces that created it. In this way the only people that are left in the story are those who suffer from contact with this object and not those who unleashed this object upon the world.

L: Yes, I think you raised some very important points here. First, there is what we can now call the question of distance. The sublime exists for some, but not for others. This distance or security only exists for some people, but not for those whom you called “the community of victims” – in other words, people who are directly affected by radiation, by formaldehyde exposure, or other chemicals, or injuries. Those affected, the survivors, oftentimes have to manage their lives in a much more pragmatic fashion in light of the aftermath and endurance of past or ongoing (slow) violent processes. To butcher Kant even more, one could say that they are more reliant on practical everyday reason than on their aesthetic sensibilities. However, this would be still up for debate. Shapiro would probably say that you need these aesthetic bodily insights in order to first form an object of concern. You need sublime aesthetics in order to develop practical knowledge for your further actions against this object within you. I strongly agree with you, however, that the analytical introduction of the “chemical sublime” smacks a bit like an aestheticization of suffering. It is more concerned with actual effects and results of harm than with its production, or as you said, with the political and economic forces behind it. I think this second critique is perhaps even stronger…

L and K continue talking. The car switches lanes, mimicking the meandering conversation which goes from one idea to another, from one author to the next. Houston’s presence starts to be felt. Here somewhere the sublime I-10 crosses paths with the chemical sublime of petroindustrial complexes and respiratory disease, sublimes getting nested into each other.