Toxicity Keywords
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Agency
In the environmental justice model, the member of the community under assault by pollutants asserts her agency by stepping up and demanding change (Lerner 2010). She engages in a political agency, gaining and utilizing scientific and legal expertise to mobilize and legitimate the need for action. The end goal is a change in material conditions, whether on the scale of toxicant levels in the air or in the body, or on the scale of the factory shutting down.
Yet, outside the sphere of the isolated community and perfectly corresponding polluting corporations, this model of action begins to break down. In a vast, interconnected global network of production, there is often no single perpetrator that any toxin can be traced back to. And even if it were possible, this interconnectedness means that entire economic and political regimes are inherently dependent on toxic processes, and change could not be enacted without also changing the ways of being which have developed as a result of those processes. Furthermore, much of the damage is irreversible, at least on a human time scale. Our chemicals will survive for hundreds of human generations. Thousands of species are permanently extinct.
Nonetheless, it seems that the concept of agency remains important in fighting back against the dynamic of a one-sided damage, extraction, and pollution. Max Liboiron proposes a new understanding of agency, in which political agency may be found within the ethical agency of everyday behaviors, which, even accumulated, may not lead to any “larger” change at all (Liboiron 2018). It answers the question: Given our damage, how ought we to live?
Alterlife
Alterlife is a concept created by Michelle Murphy as a response to an anthropocene reality in which life has been permanently altered by chemicals, affecting both present and future generations. In the words of Murphy (496): “Alterlife names life already altered, which is also life open to alteration. It indexes collectivities of life recomposed by the molecular productions of capitalism in our own pasts and the pasts of our ancestors, as well as into the future. It is a figure of life entangled within community, ecological, colonial, racial, gendered, military, and infrastructural histories that have profoundly shaped the susceptibilities and potentials of future life. Alterlife is a figuration of chemical exposures that attempts to be as much about figuring life and responsibilities beyond the individualized body as it is about acknowledging extensive chemical relations.”
Biopolitics
First introduced by Michel Foucault, biopolitics refers to the control of human life processes by authorities through technologies of discipline and regulation. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the introduction of these technologies enabled an overlaying of traditional sovereign power with biopower, whose domain of regulation stretches from the “anatomo-politics” of the individual body at one scale to the biopolitics of the social body – the population – at the other end. In the last half century, technoscientific practices in genomics, biotechnology, and neurochemistry have extended the realm of biopolitics to encompass a politicization and commodification of the molecular realm (Nikolas Rose, “Molecular Biopolitics”, 2007).
This “molecularization” of biomedical ways of perceiving has had significant consequences for what ideas of health and normativity mean. In his exploration of the role of pharmaceuticals in contemporary life, Joe Dumit (2012) argues that the healthy body has been replaced with a body always at risk—pre-diabetic, pre-cancerous, pre-stroke. According to Dumit the statistical techniques by which subjects have been both individualized as a set of numerical measures and amalgamated into a population with averages, norms and deviations also enabled the production of a not-quite-healthy, not-quite-sick body. Through pharmaceutical trials new molecular norms, of blood pressure or cholesterol for example, can be perpetually (re)calibrated and new targets set.
Dumit suggests that this process creates “surplus health” for appropriation by the pharmaceutical industry, an un-closable gap between that which is “healthy” and that which demands biomedical management by way of pharmaceutical intervention. These are the same knowledge practices mobilized by both polluting industries and environmental justice activists in epistemic contestations over causality and “acceptable” levels of exposure. However, toxicity reverses the equation. While the pharmaceutical industry looks to define as acceptable the smallest deviation from a norm as possible, thereby justifying the sale of drugs, toxic industry seeks to define as large of an acceptable deviation as possible, thereby justifying ever greater production of risk. How, then, do these industries, which of course are never entirely separate, produce both bio-normativity and an ever-shifting range of acceptable deviation which simultaneously demands biomedical self-management and justifies ever greater toxic risk?
If, at the time of Foucault’s writing, life could be conceived as a border to politics “that should be simultaneously respected and overcome”, it is precisely the border between life and non-life that becomes diffuse and often illegible in the modern emergence of a “chemical regime of living”. At the molecular scale, organic and nonorganic intermingle. Molecular relations “extend outside of the organic realm and create interconnections with landscapes, production, and consumption” (Michelle Murphy, “Chemical Regimes of Living”, 2008).
On the one hand, the regulative power of the state is diminished by the multitude of sources, toxins, and pollutions intermingled in the global network. These toxic relations cannot be simplified into a causal chain. The regime is rather economic and epistemological. It is an autonomous system which regulates at a level of specificity impossible for a centralized authority. On the other hand, the possibilities of controlling life are multiplied. The self becomes permeable. There is uncertainty where the individual ends and the collective begins, or where the individual ends and the environment begins. Lamoreaux writes, “the environment is a series of people embedded and embodied in the sometimes toxic human and nonhuman environments of the past and present” (Lamoreaux 2016).
The Chinese government institutionalized “raising population quality” as a national goal in the 1980’s, for example through measures of aptitude, physical form, and health (Anagnost 2004). At the same time, rapid industrialization transformed toxicity into a basic condition of life. The notion of a chemical regime allows us to directly compare these actions as two contradictory forms of biopolitics. As opposed to the sovereign’s right to “take life or let live,” biopower grants “the right to make live and to let die” (Foucault, “Society Must be Defended” 1976). In a toxic world, the default is death. Life, in the form of face masks, or mitigative health care, has become a good to be distributed.
Body
The body is not only susceptible to its environment; it incorporates the environment into itself. Every human body now contains microplastics, and the chemicals in our environments build up within our bodies. Lamoreaux (2016) argues that bodies become environments; a mother’s body, and all of the toxins that it has been exposed to both out in the world and in her own mother’s womb, become the environment in which a child develops. Likewise, Shapiro (2015) discusses bodies “embodying atmospheres.” To what extent is the body part of, and subject to, its environment? Are bodies at all separate from environments in the “chemical regime of living” (Murphy, 2008)?
These questions can be challenging when approached from a critical frame influenced by a feminist tradition which has historically been skeptical of biological sciences and consequently developed a robust critique of the bio-essentialization of gender and other axes of oppression. Some scholars have followed Margaret Lock in developing conceptual tools building on her notions of local and situated biologies (Lock 2018). This work highlights the roles of both sociocultural and biomaterial forces in co-constituting the human, insisting on a multiplicity and variability of bodies that resists the universal human of normative biomedicine.
Lamoreaux (2016) follows much of this work in its turn to epigenetics as a vector for the constitution and reshaping of bodies. This analytic shift can help undermine nature/culture binaries that structure much of technoscientific thinking. It is also particularly provocative in the case of toxicity where the substances under consideration, those associated with the nuclear likely being the most emblematic (Masco 2010), are often capable of enacting significant reconfigurations of genetic material.
And yet situated biologies have not quite evaded the risks of bio-essentialism. How does one discuss communities living with pervasive toxicity, much of which is implicated in neurological change, without again essentializing difference? How can we take seriously the material effects of toxicants without reinscribing difference in a body largely seen as overdetermining and immutable? Is an insistence that the material is always also sociocultural enough when we can see how entire nations and even regions get coded as toxic and homogenized in ways that reproduce biological essentialism? What analytic tools are needed to walk the fine line between this essentialization on the one hand and a potentially equally problematic dismissal of the biomaterial on the other?
Containment
In the context of farmland pollution through contaminated groundwater movements in the Rocky Mountains, Rachel Carson observed in Chapter 4 of her book Silent Springs that: “This seepage had continued to spread and had further contaminated an area of unknown extent. The investigators knew of no way to contain the contamination or halt its advance” (1962: 43). Despite all efforts to contain it, Carson here speaks to the most central fact that toxicity cannot be easily contained. “Unlike viruses,” as Mel Chen remarked, “toxins are not so very containable or quarantinable” (2011: 281).
Containment, through storage, enclosure, and periodization entails a purity idealization. It implicates that one has the power to confine and control some object or phenomena. The notions of “pollution,” “contamination,” and “virology” take this purity ideal and the idea of containment for granted, whereas toxicity seems to follow a very different, non-modern, non-linear logic. Unlike “pollution,” here understood as a deviation from a pristine natural origin, toxicity has a very different geographical/temporal distribution that defies origins and fixed locations. Toxicity introduces new and obscure causality modalities.
In a presentation with the title The Art of the Same at the 4S conference in New Orleans this year, Fernando Domínguez spoke about “technologies of containment” and about how artworks are tried to be preserved and contained in museum environments. As an “apparatus against time,” as Jerry Zee (2017) termed it, these technologies of containment, so Domínguez, try to “build insides into the world” through “mimeographic labor.” The difficult task with this labor is “to enable objects to remain the same through time and space” and “to create forms of suspension.”
Decolonization
Gilio-Whitaker (2019, 25) cautions that dominant environmental justice frameworks are of limited use to indigenous peoples unless they “can frame issues in terms of their colonial conditions and can affirm decolonization as a potential framework.” According to Tuck and Yang (2012, 7) decolonization, at its most basic level, involves the “repatriation of land simultaneous to the recognition of how land and relations to land have always already been differently understood and enacted; that is, all of the land, and not just symbolically.” A conceptual conflict emerges when, as we see in Sacrifice Zones (Lerner 2010), traditional approaches to environmental justice center settler-colonial land relations and appeals to the settler nation-state for redress.
Gilio-Whitaker (23) suggests that decolonizing environmental justice would involve recognizing and centering indigenous conceptions of justice and land-human relationalities. Such a framework understands justice as fundamentally restorative and sees humans as interconnected with land in systems of responsibility. Decolonial frameworks, according to Gilio-Whitaker (26-7), imagine a “decolonized American justice system [which] would also necessarily encompass both the colonized and the colonizer.” This, they argue, would benefit both the colonized and colonizer as the latter is enabled to rediscover “their own ancestral wisdom” and “learn how to respect themselves and others.”
However, Tuck and Yang caution against definitions of decolonization that operate primarily at a metaphorical or conceptual level. They emphasize the inherently radical nature of any political project which both repatriates stolen land and recognizes indigenous conceptions of all land. Such a project abolishes private property in land by definition, and with it both capitalism and the nation-state. Accordingly, a decolonial framework of environmental justice would–and indeed should–be deeply unsettling. In foregrounding the unsettling nature of decolonization Tuck and Yang call into question whether “decolonization is good for both the colonizers and the colonized” and suggest that decentering the settler refuses this question from the outset.
Displacement
Displacement refers to the distance between the origin of violence and where, or when, it is felt. This can manifest temporally, geographically, rhetorically, or technologically. Displacements “simplify violence and underestimate, in advance and in retrospect, the human and environmental costs” (Nixon, 2011). Likewise, displacements make it more difficult for victims to identify the sources of harm and seek justice. Temporal and physical displacements often occur simultaneously in cases of toxic violence; the “primary beneficiaries” of industry often live somewhere else, and before, those who bear the brunt of harm from toxic emissions and pollution (Nixon, 2011).
Additionally, Nixon conceives “place” as “a temporal achievement” to emphasize the ways in which delineations of space, such as a national border or blast radius, are temporally situated. Notions of responsibility, cause and effect, and violence itself are inextricably linked to the temporal framing of place, which, as Gilio Whitaker notes, makes the co-habitation and governance of land by both indigenous and settler capitalists a temporal problem among others. Thus, while displacement can refer to the physical relocation of violence, resources, and accountability as well as the temporal delay of violence beyond the present, it can also be understood as the elimination of place by temporal refusal–dis-placement.
Evidence, Care, and Kinship
In the spirit of Michel Foucault’s notion of biopolitics, the government tends not to care about the effects of toxicity on the health of the people until it represents a demographic crisis. In relation to forms of evidence, this is in line with the adage, “one’s an anomaly, two’s a trend.” Invoking the notion of care and caring: who cares, how, and when? Asking these questions informs the kinds of evidence that we ultimately choose to produce.
In Sacrifice Zones, individual people and activists began to care when friends and family fell ill. Then, they turned to door-to-door health surveys in order to accumulate data to present to the government in order to incite action. In appealing to the reader, the narrative strain of the piece and it’s attention to the lives of individuals is meant to make the human being on the other end care. In appealing to the government, alternate forms of evidence, evidence that aggregates data (such as maps, scientific research, etc.) is meant to make authority care. But these forms of caring are not the same; rather, “caring” to the government, produced by population-level data, is a kind of “anonymous care.” It’s an interesting question to ask what kind of evidence gets apprehended when the goal is to produce different kinds of caring, and for what ends? Oftentimes, individual-level evidence, in the forms of personal narratives or memoirs (such as “Body Toxic”), is not considered “evidence” or “truth” in the traditional sense at all, but nonetheless it can engender a strong sense of care and even action; however, it usually must be taken in conjunction with aggregate forms of data in order to be seen as legitimate to institutions.
Finally, another interesting question is how traditional notions of kinship get implicated in both types of evidence and “caring.” Sacrifice Zones appeals to relationships such as friends, family, and partners to make us care. And in the production of aggregate data, neighbors, friends of friends, family of friends, etc. may get called upon, and traditional boundaries (like neighborhoods, cities) get inscribed. How might non-traditional notions of kinship inform how individual and population-level evidence gets produced, as well as who it urges to care, and what kind of care it produces?
Exposure
Different than destruction and invasion, exposure refers to singularized and distributed effects of, as well as risky contacts with, materials and chemicals. It relates to the deprivation of bodily integrity, shelter, and comfort. Linked to disease and health standards, it is accounted for in elevations, severity, levels of accumulation, and “cold statistics about unequal rates” (Lerner, Sacrifice Zones 2010). Nevertheless, “exposure” surrounds itself with uncertainty and illegibility. As a relational and anthropogenic term, it assumes a clear-cut boundary between environments and humans. Thus, it is based on “infrastructures of individualism” that introduce modern “expectations of impermeability” (Roberts, “Exposure” 2017) for the very few, whilst treating most others as permeable and disposable.
In Michelle Murphy’s first single-authored book Sick Building Syndrome (2006), one finds a major concern with how chemical exposures in American office buildings are “materialized as uncertain events.” Her concern was with understanding how exposure, understood as “an effect between buildings and bodies,” materializes into something perceptible, recognizable, legible. Her methodological ambition here was to write a “historical ontology of exposure:” “Chemical exposures do not only happen when we know about them. Instead, attention to historical ontology underlines that it was only in the eighteenth century, when humans found ways to detect and manipulate entities called molecules, that we could assert that molecules had always existed even before we knew about them. Now that we have molecules we need them and do things with them; they are things we cannot live without” (ibid. 7/8).
Recognizing an exposure and its “multiple, often conflicting circumstances” means to demarcate thresholds between what is real and unreal, what is perceptible and imperceptible. The question of thresholds, and what form and ontological level of thresholds, thus also stands at the core of the problem of exposures. “Domains of imperceptibility were the inevitable results of the tangible ways scientists and laypeople came to render chemical exposures measurable, quantifiable, assessable, and knowable in some ways and not others” (ibid. 9).
Feminism and Environmentalism
Some criticize invoking feminism in issues of the environment because it seems to place the onus of change and solution on women. However, to say environmentalism is a feminist issue is not to say that it is up to women to solve, but rather it allows us to rethink the ways in which, without feminism, we conceive of humans, nature, and the environment in traditionally gendered ways. Traditional environmentalism, rather than feminist environmentalism, is what reinforces the dominant structures that cause women to be disproportionately affected by environmental issues.
These issues of toxicity and environmental damage often frame both the problem and the solution within the domain of women. In the scientific and media coverage of EDCs, the problem was an undermining of masculinity and feminization of nature, with decreases in testosterone counts and frogs with both female and male reproductive organs (King & Hayward, 2013). In toxic epigenetic relations, the uterus is framed as the first environment for children, which places the blame on the mother (Lamoreaux, 2016).
Insofar as a solution is “caring more,” this is also the domain of women. While science is masculinized, care is feminized; science is what makes issues known, and care is what fixes them. And the ability to care and empathize has always been allocated to women, who are expected to be more attuned to their bodies and environments. As a result, women are imbued with this “special power” to know more intimately the toxicity of their environments and bodies, and thus they are expected to care and act. Much of the rhetoric about these issues appeal to traditional roles held by women, such as caregivers, mothers, and wives. For example, a sign at the climate strike, which read “climate change hurts kids before birth,” also included a drawing of a pregnant feminine body; the focus on children and the picture of the pregnant body clearly meant to draw in women in particular as the agent of change.
Traditional notions of gender are the reason that this kind of language gets used when talking about environmental issues, and it is also the reason that women are disproportionately affected by these issues. For example, exposure to toxins in the domestic space, exposure to toxins in impoverished settings, and exposure to toxins in certain feminized lines of work tend to affect women more than men. Insofar as feminism attempts to expose and rework these flawed relations between gender and the environment, you can’t have environmentalism without feminism.
Health
Health, and health impacts, are often viewed as the outcomes of exposure to toxicity. Though health can be quantified and measured through the medical field, it is often also measured through community surveys conducted by regular people. In “Attuning to the Chemosphere,” Harriet writes letters to the editor asking “Modular home owners, have you had any health problems?” (Shapiro 384). Health can be thought of at the individual level, impacting unique bodies, whereas public health is at the level of community or society. Both levels are impacted by toxicity.
Innocence and Guilt
In toxicity rhetoric, abstract things, inanimate things, bodies, companies, etc. often get assigned notions of innocence, along with its counterpart, guilt. The uses of these words are significant for several reasons:
- They elucidate a two-way dynamic of perpetrator and victim. These words lend a clearer directionality of who is responsible for the harm, and onto whom the harm is felt.
- Along similar lines, they materialize a kind of agency in a field with too much “toxic noise,” which makes it difficult to point fingers (). The sense of agency given by “blame worthy,” or “guilty,” implies action, either by virtue of enacting harm, or the demand that the agent take action to correct the harm. On the other hand, “innocent” implies inaction, either on the part of reception of harm and an inability to do anything about it, or a lack of knowledge (the “un-knower”) that prevents one from acting against it.
- These terms, similarly to the framing of “violence,” appeal to a sense of justice and morality, of who deserves harm and retribution; they assign stronger intentionality than one might typically conceptualize for these agents.
- Lastly, they are taken as absolutes; when one is “innocent,” we typically do not think of them as also “guilty” within the same space. This complicates responsibility, although toxicity does not obey these traditional notions of culpability.
Given these ideas, it is interesting to think of how and why these labels get assigned to people, companies, and inanimate things. In Lerner’s Sacrifice Zones, the innocent are the people of the community, the “un-knowers.” In this context, innocence is not only the receipt of pollution, but also the lack of knowledge of its truly harmful effects. But when family and friends start to fall ill, the pollution can no longer be ignored, and those with this awareness are no longer “innocent.” Simply standing by would make them complicit, although they are also the innocent receivers of this pollution themselves. Thus, the assignment of innocence and guilt is complicated.
In Janelle Lamoreaux’s, What If the Environment is a Person?, the assignment of maternal blame in the mother-fetus relationship also serves to reduce the complexities of the agents involved in toxic environments, and their culpability. She writes that this relationship “relies on an assumption of two individuals—a mother, depicted as a badly behaving vessel, and a developing fetus, the victim of the mother’s exposures and behaviors” (204). As a result, Martyn Pickersgill and colleagues state that “‘In effect women are framed as the first environment for children, potentially activating and augmenting a range of moral discourses and subjecting [women] to (increased) scrutiny.’” (204). In regarding the fetus as an innocent victim of exposure, it is tempting to deem the mother as guilty. However, once again, toxicity complicates this direct relationship, for the mother is also an innocent receiver when situated in the broader social, environmental, national, etc. contexts of toxicity. In effect, the mother is “turned into an individually responsible being, stripped of her surroundings” (Landecker 2014, cited in Lamoreaux, 204).
Overall, while the notions of innocence and guilt are meant to assign clearer agency and a sense of justice and morality, in effect, they actually complicate the arena of who is to blame. It seems that these assignments may act as scapegoats for the true perpetrators, who benefit from both “toxic noise” and the clamor of culpability.
Interobjectivity
In their article “Toxic Animacies, Intimate Affections,” Mel Chen presents the concept of interobjectivity as a way of imagining relations that does not presume a fundamental difference between living and dead things. Chen writes of sinking into their couch after an exhausting day of navigating hazards to which their body is especially sensitive; their inability to communicate as a human results in “an intimacy which does not differentiate” (278) between couch and human. Ultimately, they argue for the lively, generative potentials of living in a contaminated world, noting that this does of course come alongside harm and suffering. Interobjectivity, as opposed to intersubjectivity, does not draw stringent boundaries between entities or assume scripts of ways of behaving between beings. This breakdown is made possible by toxic conditions; toxification may exacerbate the vulnerability of a formerly closed-off body, but this also leaves beings open for the possibility of building more generative affective relations.
Metaphors
There is a rising temptation to use “toxicity” as a metaphor. There is a persistent and also rapidly multiplying “toxic allure,” as Mel Chen coins it. People speak, for example, about their “toxic relationships,” “toxic acquaintance,” and “toxic political atmospheres” (2011: 266). These “toxic figures,” as Mel Chen further elaborates, “populate increasing ranges of environmental, social, and political discourses. Indeed, figures of toxicity have moved well beyond their specific range of biological attribution, leaking out of nominal and literal bounds while retaining their affective ties to vulnerability and repulsion” (ibid. 266).
Metaphorical usage can do further damage to literal toxicity by desensitizing discursive and practical conditions. Instead of refusing the metaphorical inflation of “toxicity,” Chen deploys metaphors such as “toxic assets” and “toxic animacies” and dances “between advocating the notional release of the metaphor of toxicity and marking its biopolitical entrainment as an instrument of difference” (ibid. 279). As long as toxic events and conditions are not decoupled from their metaphorical counterparts, such textual strategies might remain effective and suitable.
Writing from the local context of uranium mining in eastern Gabon, Gabrielle Hecht refuses to accept the “framing the biophysical properties of waste as lively or vibrant (Bennett 2010; Hird 2012; Reno 2014). Metaphors matter. And those particular metaphors enchant: they make materials appear mystical and mysterious. Their joyful connotation can all too easily erase the brutal histories and ontologies that produce new biophysical phenomena” (2018: 112).
After reading Omar Dewachi’s very literal account of how large-scale U.S. toxic warfare through the employment of depleted uranium weaponry in Iraq has afflicted all aspects and “quotidian realities of life in Iraq,” I feel affirmed in not easily accepting academic metaphorical playfulness. The documentation of toxic events and conditions marks marginalized populations, while toxic metaphors may designate people and populations that are less or differently affected and subject to different vulnerabilities and afflictions. Different phenomena are described with the same name or in similar terms. This indicates that the omnipresence of toxicity has become a norm. Indeed, toxicity shapes bodies, geographies, relationships, but its different manifestations as event, condition, communication should not be easily mixed up or downplayed through purely associative metaphors. How can one be made aware of the subtle differences, nuances, and levels of suffering? How can one avoid these “metaphorical luxuries” (as Mel Chen calls it) and avoid shifting the discourse away from literally toxic events and conditions?
Nature
Whereas both “nature” and “environment” place humans as Cartesian subjects opposed to a relatively inert surrounding that is acted upon, traditional notions of nature are distinct from notions of the environment in its evocation of purity, of an environment specifically without humans. Whereas environment implies envelopment and at least a certain level of interdependency, nature implies an object not just outside of us and beyond us, but away from us, “a single, solid, present-at-hand thing ‘over-there’ called Nature” (Timothy Morton).
In Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring nature is a self-regulating system which has been perverted through technology and science, with humans as both the agents of destruction and the victims of that very destruction. Written in the decades after WWII, in the face of still-emerging dangers of mass-produced, toxic, and everyday chemical usage, images of a spectacular and urgent destruction of something pure (“a town in the Heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings”) may have been a necessary galvanizing force.
Yet this idea of a natural nature has become a stumbling block for the ensuing environmental movement. Working towards the preservation of or reversion to nature is entirely missing the point. Given the sheer multiplicity of causal relations and harmful impacts of the chemosphere we now live in (Shapiro 2015), and the irreversibility of the toxic relations that have developed within it, the environmental movement must commit to the value of protecting a poisoned world. “There is no Eden to return to” (see entry on Purity). We can’t disown our radiation, our leakages, the deathly black of our oil spills. We must stand with it all, and perhaps in this standing, open up new ways of being with ourselves and others.
Non-innocence
Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto (1982) denounced the categorical distinctions (between man/woman, natural/unnatural, human/machine) and embraced the complex messiness of interconnectedness. We are bodies of both machine and non-machine—whether or not we have medical implants that allow us to function, we are products of our technology-centered world in which both the material byproducts of technology (chemicals) and the semiotic (obsession with optimization) are inextricably linked to our existence. Simply, we are cyborgs.
Non-innocence conceptualizes this messiness with themes of responsibility and “response-ability”. If we are to accept a world in which we cannot separate our existence with the destruction of others/ourselves, we are unable to reach a state of innocence. Haraway illustrates this with specific examples in the realms of agribusiness and pharmaceuticals. In her 2018 piece “Awash in Urine,” she traces the synthetic estrogen diethylstilbesterol (DES) from livers of dead cattle to compounding pharmacies to the bodies of she and her dog. In doing so, Haraway illustrates the ways in which we are inextricably tied both to the good and the evil of our incorporated technologies and chemicals. “There is no innocence in these kin stories, and the accountabilities are extensive and permanently unfinished,” she writes, “these stories requires the cultivation of viral response-abilities, carrying meanings and materials across kinds in order to infect processes and practices that might yet ignite epidemics of multispecies recuperation and maybe even flourishing” (114, 2018).
In the context of toxicity, non-innocence asks us to confront the fact that our now and our future produces toxicity. Even if we are to stop all toxic productions right now (highly unlikely), the residue of our bombs, our lead pipes, our asbestos, our radioactive substances persist into our future. Given this, is there a “climate justice” without purification? How might we ask other people to step towards lessening the effects of toxicity if there is not an expectation of absolution, purity, and restoration? In Haraway’s argument, she insists that our ties to toxicity necessitate regard, consideration and action: a response. Rather than ignorantly categorizing technologies and toxins as wholly good or evil, Haraway asks us to explore our relationship with ourselves and our surrounding and respond, hence “response-ability.” Thus, the world through our eyes necessitates a response mitigating effects of toxicity, of climate change, even as we embrace non-innocence.
Pathways
How do toxic materials travel and to what extent can designations of “toxicity” be made without first having an understanding of how materials move through time, space, and specific kinds of bodies and the relationship between these temporal-spatial rhythms to particular regimes of existence? Furthermore, how do hegemonic frameworks used for conceptualizing the movement of materials through biotic and abiotic dimensions of the planet, such as the global carbon cycle, affect ethical evaluations of toxic substances? If carbon, for instance, is conceived by the carbon cycle imaginary as a finite material, endlessly recycling throughout the planet’s living and nonliving bodies, how does it become “toxic” and might anthropogenic trappings and redistributions of this material be a pre-condition for this designation? Such questions signal how western epistemological dualisms, such as nature-culture, and imaginative temporal forms, such as the cycle, might mutually constitute the ethical axes through which materials with varying properties achieve toxic status.
Pollution
Pollution and toxicity conceptually overlap, but are also distinct. One distinction is that pollution finds its opposite in purity, as Mary Douglas memorably noted, but toxicity operates differently: “Management via separation, containment, clean up and immunization – the hallmarks of 20th-century pollution control – are premised on a politics of material purity that is no longer available or was never viable to begin with” (Libioron, Teroni, Calvillo, “Toxic Politics” 2018).
Polluted Politics
Giovanna DiChiro coins the term “polluted politics” in reference to a politics of “sex panic” surrounding toxicity and its impact on sex and reproduction. A polluted politics takes for granted what culture-at-large has considered “normal” and “natural,” and thus deems differences in ability, sex, and sexuality that arise due to pollution and toxic exposure as abnormal or unnatural. Polluted politics thus works “to reinforce the dominant social and economic order (the forces actually behind environmental destruction and toxic contamination of all our bodies and environments) by naturalizing the multiple injustices that shore it up…even while claiming to stand for diversity and justice” (DiChiro, 224).
Purity
Related to conceptions of non-innocence, purity can be variously understood as an ideal state, a form of division or classification, a value system or doctrine, and a fallacy or fantasy. Although ideas about how purity can or should be maintained vary widely across different cultural contexts, anthropologists have documented the ways it expresses desires for keeping different categories of things (whether they are substances, natural kinds, or social statuses) separate from one another, thereby avoiding consequent impurity or pollution inviting unwanted ambiguity, confusion, and social disorder (Purity and Danger, Douglas 1966). Despite generally connoting a positive condition, purity can only be defined negatively, where there cannot be combinations or mixing of one thing with others (Forth 2018). These framings of danger are also intimately tied to forms of normativity and power such as ableism, patriarchy, and colonialism (Monahan 2011), and increasingly rely on the individual to maintain. As Alexis Shotwell notes in Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times (2016), “Under contemporary regimes dictating individualist responses to purity, we are made responsible for our own bodily impurities; we are called upon to practice forms of defense against our own vulnerability.” Occupying this state of impurity then implies ways to purify through the removal of uncleanliness or pollution. However, worlds always exceed our conceptions of them. Given that there is no Eden to return to and “chemical enfleshments cannot be undone” (Murphy 2008), impurity constitutes a space of no remediation and draws our attention to mutant or relational ways of being.
Queer/Queering/Queerness
Mel Chen suggests that thinking (and feeling!) with/through toxicity may enable a rethinking of queer bonds – with potential to open up new theorizations of affectivity and relationality. They write that a “toxic queer bond might compliment utopian imagining” and address “how and where subject-oriented dispositions might be attributed to the relational queer figure” (Chen 2011: 265).
Chen, through their analysis of queer licking and the figure of the “iconic white boy” who must not be allowed to become toxic (Chen 2011: 266) suggest that queer vulnerabilities are things that states cannot afford to acknowledge. Chen notes how queers are treated as toxic assets by states (Chen 2011: 273) but then poignantly asks: “What happens when queers become intoxicated?” (Chen 2011: 273). With their formulation of ‘queer ingestion’, Chen notes how there is always a potency and intensity associated with exchange (Chen 2011: 275) and that exchange is always potentially queer because it always involves vulnerability – always risking implantation or injury (Chen 2011: 275). These exchanges can be molecular, or at a much larger scale – or they may even be visual or sensorial, with senses unleashing pleasant or unpleasant bodily (chemical) reactions.
In Awash in Urine: DES and Premarin in Multispecies Response-Ability, Donna Haraway mobilizes queerness as a noncommitment “to reproduction of kind” and “having bumptious relations with futurities”.
Risk Society
Ulrich Beck defines risk society as “a systematic way of dealing with hazards and insecurities induced and introduced by modernization itself” (Alaimo 2010). Rather than natural disasters producing harms in ways that seemed uncontrolled or unpredictable, a risk society is state where the majority of risks can be measured, specific, and known of when produced. This conceptual framework has broad implications for the environmental justice movement where risk is knowingly distributed unevenly by race, class, and gender.
In a capitalist risk society, those producing risks are most exposed to it—dangerous factory or work environment place people in double risk environments where they encounter health hazards both at work and at home. Those with capital producing the risks are arguably most separated from its effects BUT we know toxicity, being a leaky thing, seeps into the everyday of all those bounded by geographic location or other specific exposures. In this way, toxicity characterizes risk society because everyone is exposed unseen risk produced by modernity, albeit unevenly.
Slow Violence
Rob Nixon introduces the concept of slow violence to, like Johan Galtung did with “structural violence,” continue “widening the field of what constitutes violence.” These concepts both do the work of expanding our conception of violence beyond compact instances of interpersonal harm or physical destruction to identify “hidden agency” behind “certain forms of violence that are imperceptible.” But the slow violence concept is distinct in its “explicitly temporal emphasis.” Nixon refers to “two scalar extremes” in which time “time becomes an actor” in the “[decoupling of violence] from its original causes.” One is the scale of geological time, the axis on which this violence marks the Earth, and the other is the attention span of the human brain overwhelmed by constantly being attuned to sensationalized violence through the internet (Nixon 2011).
The challenge in bridging these two extremes, then, is a challenge of perception. Useful parallels might be found between slow violence and Timothy Morton’s hyperobject, which can only be seen in pieces – “any local manifestation of a hyperobject is not directly the hyperobject.” (Morton, Hyperobjects, 2013). The indigenous community experiencing the destruction of their home for the production of palm oil is thousands of miles away from the final commodity. And there seems to be no locatable beginning – at different scales it is simultaneously the chainsaw operator, the corporate board meeting, global capitalism, the invention of the steam engine. What happens in the space / time between the actor and the receiver, especially when there is no single actor? For Nixon, this is the critical role of the writer-activist, whose tools of narrative and rhetoric establish an “aura of the real” drawn from the interrelationships between massive, imperceptible forms.
Gabrielle Hecht expands on the scalar dimension of slow violence by treating certain objects, for example uranium-laden rocks, as “interscalar vehicles” that we can “ride” from the atomic scale to the geological scale to narrate how both are navigated and implicated in an “African Anthropocene” that poisons people in their homes (Hecht, “Interscalar Vehicles for an African Anthropocene,” 2018). Hecht also explores how those harmed by this slow violence strategically organize and mobilize on certain political, temporal, and spatial scales.
When we discussed the significance of the word “violence” in class, Dr. Wool brought up the word “harm.” This caught my attention because “harm” is a central concept in both harm reduction movements, which confront the violence of the Drug War (Zigon, A Politics of Worldbuilding, 2017) and community accountability/transformative justice movements, which confront interpersonal violence (https://transformharm.org). Keeping in mind questions about the scale on which both violence and community organizing/social movement happens, I’m interested to explore more what relationships, parallels, and incongruences there are between interpersonal violence, structural violence, slow violence, and all of the political and social movements to narrate, intervene in, and transform their harm.
In addition, the question of the significance of framing environmental injustice as “violence” can be expanded upon in terms of another movement in which the same rhetorical shift was enacted in order to make known this arena of harm and organize around it. Emerging in Argentina and Venezuela is a term in official law called “obstetric violence,” meant as “a crime against women giving birth.” There are parallels in the populations affected, the type of agents implicated, power differentials, and notions of sacrifice, all of which framing the harm as “violence” serves to illuminate and resist.
“Violence” implies an aggressor in a situation in which agency seems unclear, materializes a harm that otherwise doesn’t have the physicality of typical forms of violence (blood, gore, physical abuse), allows for greater arousal and collectivization around the term, and implies a sort of malicious intent. Situated within this malicious intent is also a stark power differential, in which the aggressor uses their power to silence and constrain the autonomy of the victim. This is a key reframing, as it helps to clear the air of the “they’re doing their best” narrative surrounding the perpetrator. Refusing to listen to the suffering inflicted on the victims, and to continue to explain away their claims and concerns, is, in fact, a kind of malicious intent and shouldn’t be disregarded as such because of feigned ignorance. This assignment of blame through obstetric violence may be more shocking when directed at a physician, but it is surprising that a positive narrative still persists in some forms for the industrial companies, along with a sort of fatalism that “[the plant] has to be put somewhere” (Sacrifice Zones).
In both scenarios, the term “violence” allows one to push back against the inscribed passivity of the victims, either of the vulnerable women who must blindly trust the doctor, or of the vulnerable communities who often lack quantification techniques, political, social, and legislative power. In both situations, lack of a particular kind of knowledge is used against them.
“Violence” pushes back against the normalcy and acceptance of traditional yet harmful practices, such as birthing on the back (mutilation for the women, convenient for the doctor), and this methodical, accepted logic used by companies in order to reason their way to placing toxic entities in the backyards of vulnerable communities. This reasoning was rather jarringly stated by Lawrence Summers, who felt it was “impeccable” “economic logic” to relocate the toxic waste of rich countries to the under-polluted landscape of Africa (cited in Nixon’s Slow Violence). Although most wouldn’t put it so bluntly, the reasoning truly follows that the vulnerable, the poor, the minorities, are “dispensable” and “invisible” (Nixon, Slow Violence).
Spectacle
In the Introduction to his book Slow Violence, Rob Nixon defines the term “slow violence” in a few different ways, most of which explicate the temporal nature of this kind of violence (it is “slow”, “occurs gradually” and is a “violence of delayed destruction” (p. 2)). However, he also provides some negative definitions of the term, i.e. definitions of what it is not – it is not “spectacular” (p. 2) or visible.
Throughout the introduction, there is an implicit imperative to render slow violence visible (e.g. p. 13) and hence make it possible to act upon its causes and conditions. Similar concerns are distinguishable among the activists whose stories Steve Lerner presents in Sacrifice Zones and who work hard to make evidence visible via maps (p. 101) or monitors which identify the toxins in the air. Or, in the words of one of the activists: “Finally, we were seeing identified what we were smelling.” (p.113, emphasis added).
If we bracket away the obvious epistemological hierarchies of our society which prioritize sight over other senses, we could investigate the very idea of spectacle and other cognates such as “spectacular time” (Nixon, p. 6). One of the major theoretizations of the spectacle is Guy Debord’s Society of Spectacle (2010 [1967]), which proposes a critique of capitalist society through the operational category of “the spectacle”. To Debord, “[the] spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images” (fragment 4) which degrades anyone’s individual life down to “a speculative universe” (fr. 19) in which everything is up for interpretation despite the concrete forms which images take.
While Nixon doesn’t openly cite Debord in Slow Violence, he does cite some books which take on Debordian ideas. Thinking of slow violence through Debord’s conceptualization of capitalist society, helps us understand slow violence as an inherent trait of late industrial society, which cannot be treated independently of the sociotechnical processes or power hierarchies in which it is imbricated and which cause its uneven distribution.
Speculation
When it comes to knowledge production and the task of making forms, pathways, and effects of toxicity legible, what is the role of speculation and the speculative fiction genre? Because the definition of speculation is to form a theory or answer a question without “sufficient” evidence or certainty, at first consideration, speculation has no place in knowledge production. However, pursuing this line of reasoning should make us question just how much evidence is considered “sufficient,” and the kinds of knowledge we take to be “evidence.” Asking these questions reveal that the line between speculation and truth can be blurry; “truth” is not quite as objective as it seems, and “speculation” is not as far from reality as we think.
Does speculation relieve us of the burden of knowledge and evidence? On one hand, it is the nature of the genre to provide an account whose “facts” are not verifiable and do not have to be. On the other hand, speculation, divorced from simple fiction, has the burden of making known, making legible a phenomenon; in order to do this, speculation must uphold certain abstract truths, and extrapolate from them. The best kinds of speculation, the most impactful, perform this act of knowledge production. Currently, inundation of scientific “truth” seems to be obscuring the real phenomena of living in a permanently toxic world; speculative fiction’s extrapolation into an unknown future makes clearer what this actually means for us.
Synthetic
Rooted in histories of the loss of strategic materials that lead to the birth of American synthetic chemistry during WWI (Streen 2014), it is estimated that now over 80,000 synthetic chemicals have been made for commercial use in the United States. Common definitions of synthetic substances frame them as products of human manufacture that imitate “natural” products or create wholly new entities. Beginning with the publication of Silent Spring, concerns about the proliferation of synthetic chemicals have been a mainstay of environmental movements since the 1960s. Often upholding nature/culture dualisms, popular understandings of the synthetic have vacillated in different cultural moments between seeing them as a polluting and destructive aberration of nature, or as a creative capacity for transformation and innovation (Roosth 2017). However, recent work has troubled this distinctions, reconsidering our relations to synthetics through bodies, environments, and identities by seeing them not as separate isolated objects from Nature, but as examples of what Bruno Latour termed hybrid networks (Block & Jensen 2011). As Michelle Murphy notes, synthetic chemicals are part of a complex set of “molecular relations” that extend into uncertain futures where they will persist beyond the point of remembering their origins as artificial or synthetic (Murphy 2008).
Toxicant
Both toxins and toxicants refer to chemicals or proteins that can injure or kill humans, animals or plants, and are terms that often used interchangeably (NIH 2019). However, unlike toxins, which are poisons produced within the cells of bacteria, plants, and animals, toxicant refers to non-organic, synthetic chemicals that are the byproducts of human activity and have come to define chemical regimes of living (Murphy 2008). This difference is not based solely in biology and chemistry, but is drawn up in much more complex economic, industrial, and regulatory systems. Toxicants are distinct not only because of the origins of their production, but also because of their “mass tonnage, wide economic production and distribution processes, compositional heterogeneity, and increasingly ubiquity in homes, bodies, and environments” (Liboiron 2017). These compounding effects and their overwhelming scales perpetuate different forms of biochemical harm by causing bodily systems to work differently rather than by destroying or disrupting regular cell activity. Common toxicants include carcinogens (cancer-causing), mutagens (genetic mutation-causing), allergens (allergy-causing), and neurotoxin and endocrine disrupters (which interfere with hormone production). As Max Liboiron has noted, “When we accidentally call toxicants “toxins,” we are also accidentally naturalizing and depoliticizing industrially-produced chemicals and their politics.”
Toxic Discourse
In Stacy Alaimo’s “Material Memoirs: Science, Autobiography, and the Substantial Self,” she explains that material memoirs grapple with correlational and causational toxicity in reference to Lawrence Buell’s concept of Toxic Discourse (1998). According to Bell, Toxic Discourse relies on “allegation and insinuation” rather than proof to reveal damage to human systems, networks, and processes rather than quantify health/safety related harms (Buell 1998). It’s in this skepticism of evident broader harm (toxicants = damage) rather than specific harm (this toxicant = my tumor) that material memoirist often occupy, leading to a “miasma of skepticism [which] requires that one risk writing a self that is barely recognizable as such” (Alaimo 2010). In other words, the memoirist must leverage the multiplicity of truths to reveal the depths of toxic effects since definitive evidence cannot only be conjured by a person’s individual experience–they must “risk unrecognizability” (Alaimo 2010). Toxic Discourse is the foundational lens for a non-scientific method approach to toxicity because it “insists on the interdependence of ecocentric and anthropocentric values,” making the case for social health as an equally important consideration as physical health by exposing the interconnectedness between the two (Buell 1998).
Toxicity
Liboiron et al (2018) argue that toxicity is not “wayward particles behaving badly” nor is it “cellular level harm” (p. 333). While it does include these things, they argue that we cannot reify either of these as the locus of toxicity or harm. Rather, they argue that toxicity(ies) is/are structures. In their formulation, toxicity is “a way to describe a disruption of particular existing orders, collectives, materials, and relations” (p. 334). In this formulation – toxicity is NOT settled, as what is good or right is contested – in part, a matter of ethics. On p. 334, they write that toxicity is both affection/affliction, as well as infrastructured and infrastructuring.
Within the specific systems of industrialization, economic growth, and global capitalism, toxicity/toxicants are framed through “externality” (p. 334) – yet as they are externalized, they are very much internal/integral to capital accumulation and consolidations of power. Liboiron et. al (2018) offer us “accumulation by degradation” as a way of understanding how land dispossession occurs through toxicity vis-à-vis global capital (p. 334).
“Toxicity is a specific genre of harm that is about ordering living systems, broadly defined to include scales from cells to ways of life” (Liboiron et. al 2018: 336). If we think of toxicity this way, then toxicity is inseparable from the ways in which reproduction is governed. As such, Liboiron et al argue that toxic politics IS reproductive justice, or, borrowing from Michelle Murphy: “The struggle for the collective conditions for sustaining life and persisting over time amid life-negating structural forces, and not just the right to have children. Reproductive justice is thus inseperable from environmental justice, antiracism, and anti-colonialism (Murphy 2017: 142).
This figuration of toxicity, in which processes of (dis)ordering systems at different scales are constitutively linked, both helps clarify what is meant by toxicity qua toxicity and how toxicity might be mobilized as an analytic more broadly. Liboiron et. al (2018) argue that the organizing, structuring forces of toxicants can be understood as the reproduction of order at one scale, such as capitalism, settler-colonialism and white supremacy as discussed above, by way of the disordering of systems at another scale. While this usefully illuminates how the production and circulation of certain substances disorders on the biomolecular scale in order to reproduce and sustain capital accumulation on a macro scale, we might also ask how, for example, the disordering of kinship at the US-Mexico border simultaneously reproduces the settler-colonial nation-state in ways that reveal the toxicity of nationalisms. Such an analytic move might also help us think through popular concepts such as “toxic masculinity”, “toxic politics” and “toxic relationships”.
Vulnerability
Vulnerability is intrinsic to embodied life under late capitalism and industrial intensification, defining our understandings of precarious relationships among both human and nonhuman entities. However, its usage and ethical implications can differ widely, affecting notions of embodiment, subjectification, and sociality. Since its inauguration as a topic in fields such as political ecology and disaster studies, vulnerability has come to be defined through lenses of nature and society, subject and object, and resistance and agency (Vaughn 2016). In many popular and academic discourses, vulnerability is framed as a passive state of susceptibility, with dangers such as toxic chemicals representing active, moving threats. Inflected by notions of an autonomous and independent subject, here vulnerability is considered as a weakness and diminishment of being, with disease, injury, and “untimely” death reducing or changing someone’s capacity in ways inimical to their flourishing. (This is related to characterizations of vulnerable ecosystems as well, which is often cast as a spur for action that can be set right through purposive benevolent action (Harrison 2008)). On the other hand, as Judith Butler argues, vulnerability can also work at a more profound level, underlining the ways that corporeal life is constituted by historically-layered flows of practice, matter, and information from both the inside and outside (Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence, 2004). Vulnerability may draw attention to life’s “inherent and incessant exposure to what exceeds its abilities to contain and absorb,” but it also shows the ways life is never self-contained and potentially offers avenues for new forms of ethical action. Acknowledgment of this shared interdependency can engender social alliances, shape political institutions, support infrastructures, and forge relations between humans and nonhumans (Green 2008; Das 2010).
Waste
Distinguished by narrative, origin, and time, waste can be characterized as unwanted objects or byproducts of capitalist production that reorder space, place, and bodies. Waste is not just about individuals and their personal discards, but is also shaped by social, economic, political, and material systems that work to hide certain kinds of waste from view through uneven dispersement (i.e. sacrifice zones; Lerner, 2012). Toxic waste and industrial contaminants in particular trouble notions that waste can always be swept to an ontological space of the “Away,” a fantasy of expulsion and removal that is increasingly unsustainable to perpetuate (Morton, Hyperobjects, 2013; Thill, Waste, 2016). As Thill notes, “Our relationship to waste of all kinds, but especially this deadliest variety [such as nuclear waste], always seem to depend on a fantasy of power, a belief that humankind shall have dominion over all things, including its own detritus.” However, waste cannot be so be readily contained.