Читать книгу The Smell of Risk - Hsuan L. Hsu - Страница 7

In Foams (2004), the third book in his Spheres trilogy on the phenomenology of anthropogenic spaces, philosopher Peter Sloterdijk identifies the deployment of mustard gas during World War I as the beginning of a contemporary era marked by “the principle of air conditioning.”13 Air conditioning encompasses techniques of atmospheric manipulation across multiple scales (e.g., filter masks, air-conditioned buildings, gas warfare, the offshoring of toxic industries), as well as the profound and little-understood ways in which these manipulated atmospheres condition human being. Sloterdijk’s concept reframes the human as a breather whose being is contingent on the condition of the surrounding air; but it also reframes the air itself as a medium for differentiating human populations through the “microclimatic ‘splintering of the atmosphere’” into compartmentalized and stratified breathing spaces.14 This differentiation goes far beyond the discursive stigmatization of working-class and racialized communities as malodorous: disproportionate and prolonged exposures to risky atmospheres biochemically transform people’s bodies, minds, and moods.

Sloterdijk’s work has been pivotal for a broader “atmospheric turn” that has animated provocative interdisciplinary spatial research in the social sciences and humanities. As Peter Adey has observed, “human geography suddenly seems afloat with airs and winds, fogs and aerial fluids, with volumes, verticals and objects in the air.”15 The turn to atmosphere brings the insights of new materialism to bear on the elusive yet vital medium of air: rather than focusing exclusively on the “vibrant” qualities of objects,16 scholars of atmosphere shift attention to our material interchanges with the air. This work brings a materialist perspective to the study of atmosphere—a term that has long circulated as a metaphor for the “emotional tone” or distinctive mood of an aesthetic work.17 Geographers have investigated atmospheric phenomenologies exemplified by contemporary art, nineteenth-century novels, olfactory walking tours, and public deployments of balloons and tear gas.18 Other scholars of architecture, anthropology, geography, and feminist theory have illuminated the affective qualities of atmosphere: as Ben Anderson explains, “Affective atmospheres are a class of experience that occur before and alongside the formation of subjectivity, across human and non-human materialities, and in-between subject/object distinctions.”19 Along with geographer Derek McCormack and environmental anthropologist Tim Ingold, literary critic Jesse Oak Taylor has illuminated how atmospheric perception can conjoin lived, affective experience with an (often technologically mediated) awareness of meteorological transformations.20

In Spatial Justice: Body, Lawscape, Atmosphere (2015), legal geographer Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos draws suggestive connections between the affective appeal of engineered atmospheres and the perpetuation of power relations. According to Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, the physical and affective comforts of atmosphere prevent us from apprehending that the law is immanent throughout everyday spaces (in property law, safety regulations, trademarks, etc.). Whether in a shopping mall, a museum, or a bourgeois sitting room, we are held in an “atmospheric captivity” whereby “our needs are converted into one foundational need: the need of the atmosphere to carry on existing.”21 Because atmospheric comfort immerses and suffuses us as we breathe, Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos argues that the air itself is an insidious, little-noticed agent of interpellation: “In a time of intense atmospheric engineering, Althusser’s interpellation is atmospherically diffused. No one needs to call us anymore. We do it ourselves . . . being interpellated not through ideology (this has been suffused in atmospherics) but [through] a constructed, furious desire to perpetuate the atmosphere.”22 Whereas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos underscores the need for atmospheric ruptures and ethical decisions to withdraw from atmosphere’s affective enticements, scholars in critical race studies, Indigenous studies, and queer studies have drawn attention to the debilitating and, for many, fatal effects of atmospheres mobilized against Indigenous and racialized populations. Their interventions—which include provocative concepts such as “racial atmospheres,” “settler atmospherics,” and the reframing of antiblackness as “the weather”23—describe conditions of violence (rather than “interpellation”) in which atmospheric “withdrawal” is not a viable option. Instead, capitalism’s dependence on varied practices of racial atmospherics underscores the problem of how to transform or abolish the apparatuses of “air conditioning.” What would an equitable and/or decolonial practice of air conditioning look like—or, perhaps more importantly, what would it smell like?

Insofar as it addresses the effects of intentional and unintended atmospheric manipulations, air conditioning intersects with the systemic atmospheric transformations commonly designated by the term “Anthropocene”—or by more historically precise terms such as “Capitalocene” and “Plantationocene.”24 By approaching these transformations from the perspective of local, multifarious, and fragmented atmospheres, the framework of air conditioning challenges the tendency, in many scholarly and public conversations about the Anthropocene, to privilege the totalizing scales of the species and planet. Planetary climate change cannot be disentangled from the uneven distribution of airborne materials in the lowest sections of the troposphere (the layer of the atmosphere closest to Earth’s surface, which carries between 75 and 80 percent of atmospheric mass). As critics have noted, emphasizing the vast scales of deep geological time and the planetary atmosphere frames the Anthropocene as a crisis generated by all humans and one that threatens all humans equally; in reality, nearly all greenhouse gases have been generated in connection with racial capitalism’s cycles of extraction and accumulation, and the effects of climate change disproportionately harm vulnerable racialized, Indigenous, and postcolonial populations in places such as Syria, New Orleans, Oceania, and coastal Indigenous settlements in Alaska.25 Insofar as it maintains pleasant atmospheres for those with the most influence on environmental and economic policy, air conditioning sustains unsustainable practices of production and consumption. Thus, air conditioning is a multiscalar phenomenon not only because the local atmospheres whose molecules enter breathers’ bodies are frequently affected by the forces of global capital accumulation and the transnational offshoring of environmental externalities but also because these unevenly distributed local atmospheres reduce the sensory urgency of the (colonial, racial) Capitalocene’s emissions for those who benefit most from air conditioning. Thus, feminist philosopher Val Plumwood argues that in order to manifest the “shadow places” whose disavowed exploitation sustains culturally and materially privileged places, “we must smell a bit of wrecked Ogoniland in the exhaust fumes from the air-conditioner, the ultimate remoteness, put-it-somewhere-else-machine.”26

By filtering and manipulating atmospheres—or simply moving them around—air conditioning generates and maintains comfortable, breathable spaces for some while unevenly exposing the bodies of the poor and vulnerable to risky inhalations. As McCormack puts it, “Processes of envelopment are differently implicated in an infrastructural politics of immersion, awareness, and exposure that draws some bodies in and excludes others.”27 On an everyday level, these differential effects play out in what Elias Canetti calls “the defenselessness of breathing.”28 Breath is the most continuous site of bodily porosity or “trans-corporeality”—to invoke feminist critic Stacy Alaimo’s term for “the material interconnections of human corporeality with the more-than-human world.”29 Whereas geographers tend to think of bodies as being “in” space, breathing foregrounds how atmosphere gets into bodies: “Even as we breathe in and out, the air mingles with our bodily tissues, filling the lungs and oxygenating the blood, and in this metabolic mingling we are constituted.”30 The Latin animus associates breath with life and soul, underscoring air’s vitality as “that which animates the flesh and makes it move.”31 Even before they reach the lungs and blood, inhaled molecules directly access the brain’s limbic system through the olfactory bulbs, whose receptors “are the only neurons that are . . . directly exposed to the environment.”32 Through our differently composed breaths—modulated by factors such as air filters, fragrances, access to green space, industrial emissions, and synthetic chemicals—atmosphere materially differentiates bodies, minds, and moods. To invoke Timothy Morton, the air we breathe is a “hyperobject”—“massively distributed in time and space relative to humans,” composed by anthropogenic processes sedimented through time and dispersed across space in the form of deforestation, factories, intensive agriculture, carbon exhaust, and trajectories of waste disposal.33 Under such conditions, breath becomes “an important spatiality through which to critique contemporary relations of power and to imagine a better world.”34 And as Patrick Süskind explains in his classic olfactory crime novel Perfume, scent represents a powerful mechanism for leveraging breath’s fragility: “Scent was a brother of breath. Together with breath it entered human beings, who could not defend themselves against it, not if they wanted to live. And scent entered their very core, went directly to their hearts, and decided for good and all between affection and contempt, disgust and lust, love and hate. He who ruled scent ruled the hearts of men.”35

Air pollution is the world’s leading environmental contributor to disease, causing an estimated seven million premature deaths per year.36 In addition to premature deaths and accretive effects such as endocrine disruption, atmospheric disparities contribute to a multitude of ambient, everyday modes of debilitation ranging from lowered educational outcomes, diminished capacity to perform complex tasks, and increased suicide mortality to changes in mood including feelings of lethargy, brain fog, and chronic stress.37 Many of these effects are gendered and racialized: toxins increase breast cancer risk and disproportionately affect women’s reproductive health, and activism around asthma and other threats to children’s health in the United States tends to be led by Black and brown mothers.38 While not all airborne toxins can be perceived through smell, odors are a common medium through which risk becomes perceptible. Smells themselves frequently take the form of (or indicate the copresence of) volatile organic compounds, which have been associated with a range of short- and long-term health effects.

The consequences of air conditioning frequently manifest as shifts in affect, minor debilitations that may or may not build toward chronic or terminal health conditions. These instances of atmospheric debilitation do not conform to the common framing of disability as an identity category, or to what Jasbir Puar has called the “living/dying pendulum that forms most discussions of biopolitics.”39 Instead, they call for an understanding of debilitation as a potential outcome—“becoming disabled”—that is unevenly distributed across spaces and atmospheres.40 As Jina Kim writes, “Diverging from the theories of minority identity that have come to define the category of disability, disability functions here as atmosphere, as ambience, as an event that unfolds through the interpenetration of human and environment.”41 Building on these and other scholars working at the intersection of disability studies and critical ethnic studies, I approach atmospheric violence as a mode of proliferating toxic debilitation without forgetting that debility can give rise to transformative, even intoxicating modes of knowledge, experience, and community.

Atmospheric violence frequently overlaps with—and amplifies—patterns of racial violence, as attested by Eric Garner’s suffocation at the hands of police and the subsequent taking up of his last words (repeated eleven times), “I can’t breathe,” by Black Lives Matter activists drawing attention to the collusion between direct modes of police violence and slower, environmentally induced forms of debilitation such as Garner’s asthma.42 Both the uneven distribution of air and its insidious effects on breathers pose obstacles to representation: atmospheric differentiation is a form of “slow violence,” to quote Rob Nixon’s term for “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.”43