ecology – The Duke Reader

Drone Theory and Bearing Witness

12 Mar 2024 Etienne RPLeave a comment

A review of Nonhuman Witnessing: War, Data, and Ecology after the End of the World, Michael Richardson, Duke University Press, 2024.

How to witness a drone strike? Who—or what—bears witness in the operations of targeted killings where the success of a mission appears as a few pixels on a screen? Can there be justice if there is no witness? How can we bring the other-than-human to testify as a subject granted with agency and knowledge? What happens to human responsibility when machines have taken control? Can nonhuman witnessing register forms of violence that are otherwise rendered invisible, such as algorithmic enclosure or anthropogenic climate change? These questions lead Michael Richardson to emphasize the role of the nonhuman in witnessing, and to highlight the relevance of this expanded conception of witnessing in the struggle for more just worlds. The “end of the world” he refers to in the book’s title has several meanings. The catastrophic crises in which we find ourselves—remote wars, technological hubris, and environmental devastation—are of a world-ending importance. Human witnessing is no longer up to the task for making sense, assigning responsibility, and seeking justice in the face of such challenges. As Richardson claims, “only through an embrace of nonhuman witnessing can we humans, if indeed we are still or ever were humans, reckon with the world-destroying crises of war, data, and ecology that now envelop us.” The end of the world is also a location: Michael Richardson writes from a perch at UNSW Sydney, where he co-directs the Media Futures Hub and Autonomous Media Lab. He opens his book by paying tribute to “the unceded sovereignty of the Bidjigal and Gadigal people of the Eora Nation” over the land that is now Sydney, and he draws inspiration from First Nations cosmogonies that grant rights and agency to nonhuman actors such as animals, plants, rocks, and rivers. “World-ending crises are all too familiar to First Nation people” who also teach us that humans and nonhumans can inhabit many different worlds and ecologies. The world that is ending before our eyes is a world where Man, as opposed to nonhumans, was “the unexamined subject of witnessing.” In its demise, we see the emergence of “a world of many worlds” composed of humans, nonhumans, and assemblages thereof.

From Drone Theory to Drone Art

Nonhuman Witnessing begins with a piece of drone theory. The proliferation of drones on the battlefield, and the ethical questions that they raise, has led to a cottage industry of “drone studies,” with conferences, seminars, workshops, and publications devoted to the field. Richardson adds his own contribution by asking how witnessing occurs within conditions of drone warfare and targeted strikes from above. Drones are witnessing machines, but also what must be witnessed: new methods and concepts have to be designed to make recognizable encounters with nonhuman systems of violence that resist the forms of knowing and speaking available to the eyewitness. To analyze the witnessing of violence, as well as the violence that can be done by nonhuman witnessing, Richardson turns to theory and then to the arts. Drawing from media studies literature, he complements the notion of media witnessing, or witnessing performed in, by, and through media, by his own concept of “violent mediation,” or violence enacted through the computational simulation of reality. He also borrows from Brian Massumi the notion of ontopower, the power to bring into being, and the operative mode of preemption that seeks to define and control threat at the point of its emergence. For Richardson, drone warfare is characterized by an acceleration of the removal of human agency from military decision-making. Violence is made ubiquitous; it can take place anywhere at any time. The volume of data produced by drone sensors far outstrips human capacities for visual or computational analysis. They are transformed into actionable data by on-board autonomous software systems that rely on edge computing and AI algorithms. In a logical progression, “automated data collection leads to automated data processing, which, in turn, leads to automated response”: an ultimate end of the militarization of violent mediation is thus the “elimination of the human within technological systems to anything other than the potential target for violence.” By opposition, art insists on what makes us human. The paintings, photographs, and other art forms presented by the author emphasize the awesome power of unmanned airplanes such as the Reaper, the destruction they cause on the ground, their impact on the daily lives of those who remain under their surveillance, and their incorporation into local iconographies such as traditional Afghan war rugs. Art makes sensible the “enduring, gradual, and uneven violence done to the fabric of life” by killing machines that escape traditional forms of human witnessing.

Despite the evocative power of the concepts and artworks presented in Nonhuman Witnessing’s pages, there is a disconnect between drone theory and drone reality. The use of drones by the U.S. for targeted killings is highly publicized, because it is the most controversial, but quantitatively it remains very minor in comparison to surveillance missions. The subject of drone theory is less the drone as such than it is the drone as an illustration of the violence waged by the United States in the Middle East following the war in Afghanistan and the occupation of Iraq. New versions of the theory still have to incorporate the use of drones by new actors and in other theaters of conflict: in the Syrian civil war since 2012, during the short war between Armenia and Azerbaijan in 2020, in the Houthi insurgency against the Yemeni military supported by Saudi Arabia, and, of course, since Ukraine’s aggression by Russia in February 2022 and in Israel’s offensive against Gaza following Hamas’ surprise attack on southern Israel on 7 October 2023. The logic of preemption that characterized the United States’ war on terrorism is less manifest in these evolving situations. So is the role of AI and embarked computer systems: drones increasingly appear as a low-tech, low-cost solution, a weapon of the poor and savvy against more formidable enemies. Drone warfare and lethal autonomous weapon systems raise some complex strategic, ethical and legal questions that have been examined by a number of authors. But they are far from the “killer robots” decried in the critical literature—or hyped as a selling point by arm producers and media commentators. Richardson’s arguments against signature strikes—i.e. strikes based on behavioral patterns rather than on identity (personality strikes)—are valid and have indeed led to a reduction in targeted killings ordered by the U.S. in Pakistan, Yemen, or Somalia. But civilian killings such as the one described in the opening of the book show not that the drone is an imprecise weapon, but that it has been used in an imprecise way, just as a needle can be used imprecisely. Drones, like other pieces of military technology, can serve as inspiration or subject-matter for artists and theoreticians. But as much as drone theory is based on biased empirical ground, drone art is not a recognizable category beyond the avant-garde genre of drone music, which bears no connection with military drones whatsoever.

The power of algorithms

Whereas the chapter on “witnessing violence” used outdated evidence and questionable theory, the second chapter, “witnessing algorithms,” addresses more recent concerns and state-of-the-art technologies: ChatGPT and other applications of machine learning, deepfakes, synthetic media, mass surveillance, and the racist or misogynist biases embedded in algorithmic systems. It is based on the same conceptual swing that understands witnessing algorithms as both algorithms that enable witnessing and algorithms as entities that must themselves be witnessed. Theoretically, it draws from Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of machines as assemblages of bodies, desires, and meanings operating a generalized machinic enslavement of man, and of affect theory as interpreted by Brian Massumi and his grammar of intensities, virtual power, and futurity. Based on these references, Richardson proposes his own notion of “machinic affect” understood as “the capacity to affect and be affected that occurs within, through, and in contact with nonhuman technics.” Machine learning and generative AI can lead to false witnessing and fabrication of evidence: hence the weird errors and aberrations, the glitches and hallucinations that appear in computer-generated images or texts. “Like codes and magic, algorithms conceal their own operations: they remain mysterious, including to their makers.” But instead of denouncing their lack of transparency and demanding to open the proverbial black box, Richardson starts from algorithmic opacity as a given and attends to the emerging power of algorithms to witness on their own terms. Doing so requires the bracketing of any ethical imperative to witnessing: witnessing is what algorithms do, regardless of their accuracy or falsity, their explainability or opaqueness. Facts do not precede testimony: registering an event and producing it take place on the same plane of immanence that makes no difference between the natural and the artificial. Examples mobilized by Richardson include the false testimony of deepfakes such as the porn video of Gal Gadot having sex with her stepbrother; the production of actionable forensic evidence through the automatic detection of teargas canister images by Forensic Architecture, a British NGO investigating human rights violations; the infamous Project Maven designed by the Department of Defense to process full-motion videos from drones and automatically detect potential targets; and computer art videos making visible the inner functioning of AI.

Richardson adds to the existing literature on AI by asking how algorithmic evidence can be brought into the frame of witnessing in ways that human witnessing cannot. But he only hints at a crucial fact: most machine learning applications touted as capable of autonomous reasoning and intelligent decision-making are in fact “Potemkin AI” or “non-intelligent artificial intelligence.” The innovation sector lives on hype, hyperbole, and promissory futures. Likewise, media reactions to new technologies always follow the same tropes, from the “disappearance of work” to the advent of “intelligent machines” or “killer robots.” But the reality is more sobering. Deepfakes produce images that are not different in nature from the CGI-generated movies that dominate the box office since at least two decades. Forensic Architecture, the human rights NGO surveyed in the book, makes slick graphic presentations used as exhibits in judicial trials or media reportages, but does not produce new evidence or independent testimony. State surveillance is a product of twentieth century totalitarianism, not the invention of modern data engineers. Algorithms are biased because we designed them this way. The magic we see in AI-powered services is a form of trickery: their operating mode remains hidden because service providers have an interest in keeping it so. As Richardson rightfully notes, “machine learning systems and the companies that promote them almost always seek to obscure both the ‘free labor’ of user interactions and the low-paid labor of digital pieceworkers on platforms such as Mechanical Turk.” As such as human work will not disappear with automation, it would be a mistake to believe that human witnessing will be substituted by nonhuman forms of bearing witness. There are many human witnesses involved in the production of nonhuman witnessing. Instead of anticipating the replacement of humans by other-than-human agents, we would do well to examine the concrete changes taking place in human witnessing. The debasement of all forms of public authority, the hijacking of political institutions by private interests, the commitment fatigue in the face of too many horrors and catastrophes seem to me at the root of the crisis in human witnessing, for which the nonhuman offers no solution.

Ecological catastrophe

Richardson then turns to Pacific islands and the Australian continent to investigate the role of nonhuman witnessing in times of ecological catastrophe caused by the fallout of nuclear explosions and anthropogenic climate change. These territories, and the people they harbor, can testify to the world-destroying potential of these two crises: “just as the Marshall Islands and other nations in the Pacific were crucial sites for nuclear testing throughout the Cold War, so too are they now the canaries in the mineshaft of climate change.” Witnessing is not reducible to language or to human perception: when they take a continent or a planet as the scale of observation, they deny the human a privileged status for establishing environmental change or atmospheric control. The subject of the Anthroposcene is not the anthropos or Man as traditionally conceived, but an assemblage of humans, technologies, chemical elements, and other terraforming forces. Witnessing ecologies imply that ecologies can be made to witness impending crises and that there is an ecology of witnessing in which every element mediates every other. Drawing from affect theory and trauma studies, Richardson proposes the notion of “ecological trauma” to suggest the idea that trauma escapes the confines of the human body: “it can be climatic, atmospheric, collective, and it can be transmitted between people and across generations.” Ecological catastrophe has already been experienced by First Nations who have seen their environment shattered by settler colonialism, of which the British nuclear testings that took place on the Montebello Islands and at Maralinga in South Australia are only a late instantiation. The entire ecology—people, water, vegetation, animals, dirt, geology—was directly exposed to radioactive contaminants during the blasts and fallout, and no real effort to mitigate the effect on Aboriginal inhabitants was attempted. Polluted soil and sand melted into glass are the media used by Australian artist Yhonnie Scarce, whose glassblowing structure adorns the cover of the book. Other aesthetic works also figure prominently in this chapter, from the aerial imaging through which the planet becomes media to poems by Indigenous writers bearing witness to the destruction of their lands. For Richardson, inspired by recent developments in media theory, “attending to the nonhuman witnessing of ecologies and ecological relations continually returns us to mediation at its most fundamental: the transfer and translation of energies from one medium to another.”

The idea that we should consider nonhumans as well as humans in our processes of witnessing and decision-making already has a significant history in the social sciences. It was first put forward by science and technology studies, or STS, and it is directly relevant for the examination of technological innovation or environmental degradation. Proposed by Bruno Latour, a French STS scholar, Actor-network theory, usually abbreviated as ANT, aims to describe any phenomena—such as climate change or large technological systems—in terms of the relationships between the human and nonhuman actors that are entangled in assemblages or networks of relationships. These networks have power dynamics leading to processes such as translation (the transport with deformation of an assemblage), symmetry (representing all agents from their own perspective) or, as proposed by Richardson, witnessing. It should not be confused with the idea that humans are incapable of witnessing events that are too large-scale or too complex to be grasped by the human mind. Indeed, history shows that local communities and scholars have long understood and monitored changes in the environment and their effect on human activities. In his late work, Latour also proposed the idea that since the environmental question was radically new, politics had to be completely reinvented. We should convene a “parliament of things” where both humans and nonhumans can be represented adequately and be brought to the stand to give testimony. Although Richardson scarcely refers to this literature—he is more interested in art critique than in science and technology studies—, he shares the view that nonhuman witnessing is politically transformative. His politics is anchored in the pluriverse (a world of many worlds), mindful of the myriad of relations between humans and nonhumans, inspired by the belief systems of First Nations, and predicated on the idea that “difference is not a problem to be solved but rather the ground for flourishing.” As he concludes, “there is no blueprint for such a politics, no white paper or policy guidance.” But it is already emergent at the level of speculative aesthetics and in the creative works that punctuate his book.

Thought in the Act

Nonhuman Witnessing is published in a series edited by Erin Manning and Brian Massumi at Duke University Press. Richardson shares with the editors the taste for mixing art with philosophy and for engaging in high theory and abstract concept-building based on concrete examples. He borrows several key notions from Massumi (intensities, futurity, virtuality, preemption), who himself poached many of his insights in Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy. The new theories developed by these authors and others working in the same field go under the names of affect theory, radical empiricism, process philosophy, speculative pragmatism, ontological vitalism, and new materialism. Each chapter in the book follows an identical pattern. It introduces a new concept (“violent mediation,” “machinic affect,” “ecological trauma,” but also “radical absence” and “witnessing opacity”) that provides an angle to a series of phenomena. It develops a few cases or examples that mostly expose forms of violence that occur across a variety of scales and temporalities: military drones and remote wars (“killer robots”), algorithms (“weapons of math destruction”), and environmental devastation through nuclear testings and climate change (“the end of the world”). It covers both aspects of witnessing, as the originator of an act of testimony and as an object to be witnessed. And it uses artistic creations as illustrations of certain forms of witnessing that escape the standard model of bearing witness. The result makes a suggestive reading but sometimes lacks coherence and clarity. Richardson starts from an original idea (whether drones might become nonhuman witnesses) but stretches it a bit too far. For him, opacity is not a pitfall to be avoided but a quality to be cultivated. Rather than a contribution to theory, the book’s main impact might be on art critique. I truly admire the author’s ability to make art part of the discussion we have on humanity’s main challenges. I didn’t review the artworks curated by the author in detail, but their description makes the most lasting impression.

The Faculty of Climate & Media Studies

25 Mar 202326 Mar 2023 Etienne RPLeave a comment

**A review of Climatic Media: Transpacific Experiments in Atmospheric Control, Yuriko Furuhata, Duke University Press, 2022.**

Climatic Media My Japanese alma mater, Keio University at Shonan Fujisawa, has a Faculty of Environment & Information. Next to it stands a Graduate School of Media & Governance. Putting two distant words together, like “environment” and “information” or “media” and governance”, creates new perspectives and innovative research questions while breaking boundaries between existing disciplines. Yuriko Furuhata uses the same approach in Climatic Media. What is climatic media? How did media become articulated with climate in the specific context of Japan? In what sense can we consider the climate, and atmospheric phenomena, as media? What new research questions arise when we put the two words “climate” and “media” together? Which disciplines are summoned, and how are they transformed by the combination of climate and media? How does climatic media relate to Watsuji Tetsurō’s concept of Fūdo, to take the title of his 1935 book translated as Climate and Culture? Can we use certain media to manage the climate, to predict and to control it? What is the genealogy of these technologies of atmospheric control, and can we trace them back to previous projects of territorial expansion and imperial hegemony? If we call “thermostatic desire” the desire to control both interior and exterior atmospheres, how does this desire “scale up” from air-conditioned rooms to smart buildings, district cooling systems, domed cities, geoengineering initiatives, orbital space colonies, and terraformed planets? In what sense can we say that air conditioning is people conditioning? These are some of the questions that Yuriko Furuhata raises in her book, which I found extremely stimulating. My review won’t provide a summary of the book’s chapters or an assessment of its contribution to the field of media studies, but will rather convey a personal journey made through Climatic Media and, indirectly, back to my formative years at Keio SFC.

The many meanings of media

One of the difficulty I had with the book, and also one of the lessons I learned from it, is the multiplicity of meanings associated with the term media. According to the burgeoning field of media studies, media can be many things. In its most widely accepted meaning, media are the communication tools used to store and deliver information or data: we may therefore speak of mass media, the print media, media broadcasting, digital media, or social media. In this limited sense, climatic media is what makes atmospheric variations visible and legible through the mediation of various instruments of data visualization: thermal imaging, photographs, charts, diagrams, computer simulations, etc. Putting the climate in media format can serve scientific, informational, political, or artistic purposes. In the arts, media designates the material and tools used by an artist, composer or designer to create a work of art. Climatic Media borrows many of its examples from the arts, and documents attempts by Japanese artists to use fog, fumes, mist, and air as a material for site-specific aerial sculptures or light projection. Architecture, in particular, can be identified as an art or a discipline deeply entangled in climatic media. In architecture, media is what mediates indoor and outdoor climate: a door or a wall can therefore be considered as media of atmospheric control. The meaning of media can also be expanded to include the materiality of elements that condition our milieu. Elemental media include the chemical components of air, indoor or outdoor air temperature and humidity, atmospheric pollution, extreme weather phenomena, the planetary atmosphere, and other natural elements of climate. In a more general meaning, media are a means toward an end. Climate can be manipulated to particular effect, which may be peaceful or war-related. Climate-controlled spheres or air-conditioned bubbles can be created, using technologies that mediate and shape what counts as a habitable environment. In this broadest sense, climatic media are technologies of government, securing a livable environment for certain populations while excluding others.

The author chooses to concentrate on architecture as climatic media, foregrounding the imperial roots and Cold War legacy of Japanese architecture through the work of Tange Lab architects, including those associated with the internationally renowned postwar architectural movement called Metabolism, with Kurokawa Kishō and Isozaki Arata as key figures. In the past decades, Japanese architects and buildings have achieved iconic status and became known to a wide public. Even casual visitors to Tokyo are familiar with the Yoyogi National Gymnasium built by Tange Kenzō for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, as well as the more recent National Art Center designed by Kurokawa Kishō in Roppongi. With Tange Lab as their training ground, Metabolist architects and designers believed that cities and buildings are not static entities, but are ever-changing organisms with a “metabolism.” Postwar structures that accommodated population growth were thought to have a limited lifespan and should be designed and built to be replaced. The greatest concentration of their work was to be found at the 1970 World Exposition in Osaka where Tange was responsible for master-planning the whole site whilst Kurokawa and Isozaki designed pavilions. It was also Tange Lab and Metabolism architects (some of whom were ardent “futurologists”) who helped bring cybernetics and systems theory into urban design in Japan. After the 1973 oil crisis, the Metabolists turned their attention away from Japan and toward North Africa and the Middle East, which (if we follow Yuriko Furuhata) made them complicit with the oil economy that stands as the main threat to our planetary survival in the twenty-first century.

From Japanese Empire to Osaka Expo ’70

Many of the architectural and artistic experiments described in Climatic Media are grounded in the work of the physicist Nakaya Ukichirō, known as the inventor of the world’s first artificial snow crystal. Nakaya spent his whole life studying ice, snow, and frost formations. The Institute of Low Temperature Science he established at Hokkaidō University in the 1930s helped advance research on cryospheric and atmospheric science. It was also deeply entangled in the Japanese Empire’s territorial conquests and war effort. Nakaya and his students collaborated with the research division of the South Manchurian Railway Company (“Japan’s first think tank”) in studying causes and mechanisms of frost heaving that damaged the railroad every winter in Manchuria. They helped Japanese agrarian settlers to build houses adapted to the extreme cold climate of the region, and designed ways to operate landing runways and military airplanes in frosty conditions. Nakaya Ukichirō’s ideas were later mobilized in a Cold War context, when polar regions and extreme atmospheric conditions became at stake in the geopolitical confrontation between the United States and its allies on one side and the Communist bloc on the other. Plans to weaponize the climate included battleground weather modifications such as creating hurricanes or heavy rain through cloud seeding and other chemical interventions, as well as the direct use of atmospheric weapons such as tear gas and Agent Orange during the Vietnam War. The expert knowledge of cold climates and atmospheric conditions accumulated at the Hokkaidō Institute also found civilian applications. They helped Asada Takashi, an architect at Tange Lab, to design a proto-capsule housing for the Japanese explorers and researchers at the Shōwa Station in the Antarctic in the 1950s. Tange Kenzō himself, who had aligned with the expansionist agenda of the Japanese Empire in his youth, helped design The Arctic City in 1971, a futurist proposal by Frei Otto and Ewald Bubner to house 40,000 people under a two kilometer dome in the Arctic Circle. Capsule housing and domed cities were also nurtured by dreams of extra-orbital stations and space conquest that survived the Cold War era. More down to earth, the idea of recycling snow as a source of refrigeration is now attracting investors and tech companies to build data centers in frosty regions such as Iceland or the northern provinces of Canada.

There was an even more direct connection between the physicist Nakaya Ukichirō and the architects and artists who gathered at Expo ’70 in Osaka. His daughter, Nakaya Fujiko, was a pioneer in atmospheric art and fog sculpture. She was the Tokyo representative of the American art collective Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), and was invited by Billy Klüver to create the world’s first water-based artificial fog sculpture for the Pepsi Pavilion at Expo ’70. Yuriko Furuhata argues that father and daughter were not bound solely by blood ties and a shared interest in meteorological phenomena: it is the practice of atmospheric control that binds the scientist and the artist. Nakaya Ukichirō himself was no stranger to artistic creation: he was an accomplished sumi-e artist, and documented his studies of summer fog or winter snow with ink paintings, close-up photographs, and educational films. In turn, his daughter incorporated science into her creative process, and sought advice of former students of her father to create the fog sculpture displayed at Osaka’s exposition. Nakaya Fujiko’s fog sculpture therefore sits at the point of convergence between two genealogical threads which, together, define what is at stake in climatic media: visualizing climate and engineering the atmosphere. Enveloping Pepsi Pavilion’s dome with artificial fog was meant to turn the pavilion into an interactive “living responsive environment” responding to ambient factors such as wind, temperature, humidity, and light. The machines used to make artificial fog found practical applications beyond the realm of art. Engineers use the same technology today to cool down data centers and cloud computing service infrastructure. Artificial mist is also a familiar sight in urban centers on hot summer days, where small drops of water are projected to create an artificial fog that cools down the air. Expo ’70 also served as testing ground for other urban innovations. Futurologists and technocrats paired with architects and engineers to produce a cybernetic model of the late-twentieth-century city, with its network of data-capturing sensors and its control room filled with state-of-the-art Japanese computers. This techno-utopian vision of connectivity that was put on display at Japan’s World Exposition in 1970 can be seen as a precursor of modern “smart cities” and their networked systems of urban surveillance and social conditioning. Today, many of these technologies of mass surveillance have become mundane and prevalent, but when they first entered the streets of metropoles in the late 1960s they were seen as the creative experiments of artists, architects, and futurologists.

Genealogies of the present

Instead of presenting a linear history of climatic media or splitting her subject into neatly divided themes, Yuriko Furuhata follows a genealogical method of investigation and presentation, which “reads the past as the historical a priori of the present we live in.” She starts each chapter with a modern example of atmospheric control and then goes back and forth in time to find antecedents of the same “thermostatic desire” to control the atmosphere, with Expo ’70 as a point of concentration and the Japanese Empire as a concealed Urtext. In chapter one, city sidewalks refreshed by mist-spraying devices and data centers cooled by similar technologies lead the author to describe the fog sculpture of Nakaya Fujiko at the Pepsi Pavilion and to trace her connexion with the work of her father during wartime, which in turn found direct applications in the futurist works of architects gathered at Tange Lab. In chapter two, the rise of hyperlocalized weather predictions using artificial intelligence and smart air-conditioning systems that individually curate air flows are connected to early attempts to numerically predict the weather and to the history of futurology in Japan, with early visions of the networked society that materialized in the computerized control center of the world’s fair. Amazon’s headquarters in Seattle and its CEO’s dream of colonizing space in chapter three’s opening echo former greenhouse architectures and imperial projects of a “living sphere” (Lebensraum), with Tange Lab as a source of innovative design that connects Japan’s imperial past to modern urban planning and to utopian dome cities in the Arctic or in outer space. In chapter four, the author takes the Metabolist architects at their own word, reading their defining metaphor of metabolism through the lenses of the product life cycle and the Marxist concept of the “metabolic rift” between humans and the natural environment. Kurokawa Kishō’s holistic vision of renewable capsule housing and his early engagement with systems theory are contradicted by his use of plastics as a nonrecyclable material and by his taste for the expression “Spaceship Earth,” which foregrounds modern plans to geoengineer the Earth’s climate through technological interventions. In chapter five, modern methods of atmospheric control, from tear gas to cloud computing and smart objects, are tributary to a genealogy of urban surveillance that shows the dual use of technologies of social control, turning artistic experiments into dystopian futures.

The expression “dual-use technologies” usually refers to technologies with applications in both the military and the civilian sectors. Here, they not only connect defense industries and peaceful usage, but also imperialist rule and artistic creation. Several words and expressions straddle the border between war-making and the arts: military strategists speak of theater, engagement, or war and peace without making direct reference to Shakespeare, Jean-Paul Sartre, or Leon Tolstoy. Similarly, the term “avant-garde” used by art critics derives from military vocabulary. Furuhata proposes to expand this list of dual-use terms to “site-specificity”, originally used for artworks created to exist in a certain place, and to “climatic media” in general, describing how projects to “weaponize the weather” found applications in civilian times or how avant-garde artistic experiments were the harbinger of modern security technologies. Climatic control also borrows some of its metaphors from agriculture: cloud seeding, harvesting the weather, cultivating rain, or building greenhouses point to underlying epistemic assumptions and cultural expectations associated with controlling the atmosphere. The “cloud” now used for computer data storage is not just a metaphor: cooling data centers involves the same air-conditioning nozzles and fog machines first used by artists at the Osaka fair. Computer network systems are atmospheric in the literal sense of being carried by radio waves in the air. The cybernetic model used to regulate a house’s temperature is applied to the fiction of controlling the planet’s imaginary thermostat through feedback loops. The technical operations carried out by climatic media are both material and symbolic. Urban infrastructures such as energy grids, fiber-optic cables, air ducts, water pipes, and computer systems all rely on technologies that regulate temperature and mitigate the effects of outdoor weather. In times of planetary-scale climate change caused by human activity, it is useful to remember that operations of climatic control at one scale all have consequences at another scale: the Earth is not a closed system, and climatic media are intrinsically connected with global issues of environmental pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, and waste accumulation.

Back to SFC

Reading this book reminded me of the intellectual atmosphere I found at Keio University’s Shonan Fujisawa Campus (Keio SFC) when I first came to Japan as a teacher of French studies in the early 1990s, from 1992 to 1994. Established only two years before, SFC at that time was a hotbed of technological innovation and pedagogical breakthrough. Sometimes considered as the “birthplace of the Japanese internet,” it had chosen to equip its students and faculty with state-of-the-art technology. The ubiquitous classroom computers were not the familiar IBM PC or Apple Macintosh, but turbocharged Sun SPARCstations and NeXt computers. Learning to code was a requisite, even for students specializing in the humanities. We wrote all of our documents using LaTeX, were early users of email software, and surfed the web using the Mosaic web browser upon its release in 1993. But technology was only part of the equation. SFC’s ambition was to embark a young generation of Japanese students into a life-changing experience, and to equip them with the skills and mindset for navigating the information society and its lived environment. As a junior faculty member, I was also allowed to follow courses and seminars to improve my Japanese language skills and share the students’ experience. Expanding my French upbringing and undergraduate studies in economics, the seminars and writings of Takenaka Heizo, Usui Makoto, and Uno Kimio introduced me to emergent research topics, from industrial metabolism to green accounting and input-output tables of economic development. Due to lack of personal discipline, but also because of the interdisciplinary nature of these ideas, I failed to translate all these burgeoning ideas into a PhD after I left Japan. But the knowledge acquired at Keio SFC equipped me with life-long skills and interests, and I have lived since them off the intellectual capital accumulated throughout these two years of teaching and auditing classes. I haven’t learned anything really new since then. In my view, Keio SFC at that time conveyed the vibrancy, intellectual excitement, and creativity a former generation of Japanese architects and social scientists must have experienced at Tange Lab or through the planning of Osaka Expo’ 70. Whether Keio SFC succeeded in steering Japan into the direction it set for itself is another debate. In retrospect, I could have been more attentive to the dark clouds gathering on the horizon: the bubble economy had left Japan with piles of debt and nonperforming loans; the reduced birthrate meant there were less students for an increasing number of places available in new universities; parents were still making huge sacrifices for the education of their children; and attractiveness of foreign languages and foreign destinations for studying and working abroad tended to dwindle. Even in those early years after the creation of the campus, academic inertia and routine crept in, and there was a certain hubris in the lofty goals and ambition that animated the whole project. But these two formative years still have for me the scent of youth and boundless possibilities.

I Can’t Breathe

25 Jan 202326 Jan 2023 Etienne RPLeave a comment

**A review of Breathing Aesthetics, Jean-Thomas Tremblay, Duke University Press, 2022.**

Breathing Aesthetics “I can’t breathe!” These were the last words uttered by Eric Garner, a Black resident of Staten Island who, on July 17, 2014, was put in a deadly chokehold by an NYPD officer for allegedly selling “loosies” or single cigarettes on the street. Garner suffered from asthma, a condition that, according to epidemiological data, disproportionately affects African Americans. Garner’s last words were also those of Elijah McClain and George Floyd, two other Black men killed by police just a few years later. “I can’t breathe” has become a rallying cry for our times and is used as an expression of the asphyxiating atmosphere in which activists declare that Black Lives Matter. The unability to breathe can be understood as both a metaphor and material reality of racism, which constrains not just life choices and opportunities, but the environmental conditions of life itself. It draws our attention to breathing as a political act: the capacity to breathe, or its preclusion, defines a new form of biopolitics in which some lives are deemed worthy of inhaling fresh air and some aren’t. Reclaiming ownership of the means of respiration, literally and figuratively, may delineate a new kind of respiratory politics that recognizes breathing as an unalienable right. For Jean-Thomas Tremblay, an art critic and professor of environmental humanities, breathing is, more than ever, in the air. Of course, breathing is in the air. But it specifically is, now, in the Zeitgeist. It is a sign of the times that breathing’s intensity and its variations—submitting breathing subjects to chokehold or waterboarding, refraining from inhaling certain substances, filtering inhaled air through face masks, measuring one’s carbon dioxide emissions—now feature in our political imaginary as an expression of agency and control. For Jean-Thomas Tremblay, the crisis in breathing predates the climate urgency, the Covid-19 epidemic, or the BLM movement. He sees its emergence and intensification around the 1970s, and tracks its expression in marginal, underground, or minoritarian art productions that may have escaped the radar screen of art historians but that, more than mainstream creations or popular art, may help us to capture what is at stake in the current inability to breathe.

The crisis in breathing

According to Tremblay, “the intensified pollution, weaponization, and monetization of air and breath since the 1970s amount to a crisis in the reproduction of life.” Breathing orients life toward death. It accompanies us from the cradle to the grave or, to be precise, from our first intake of outside air at a maternity hospital to our last breath on our death bed. Breathing takes place in increasingly toxic environments. To breathe is to be vulnerable to airborne particles or poisonous gas, or to bad odors and fool air. Air carries the means of life and death, and each respiration reproduces the movement of life—inhaling and exhaling, in and out, in and out. Being out of breath, deferring to exhale, breathing in sync, being left panting or gaping for air: these variations constitute a popular nomenclature for expressing experiences of hostile environments and efforts to make life within them more livable. Being aware of one’s breath doesn’t protect us from airborne threats or breathing impediments: if anything, it makes the process of breathing harder by adding a layer of consciousness to what usually goes on without thinking. Coming back to the cultural history that forms the backbone of Breathing Aesthetics, the 1970s were characterized by the triple attempt to purify, weaponize, and marketize air. Pollution and air quality became increasingly debated in these years, which saw mounting scientific evidence of greenhouse gas accumulation and global temperature rise. Weaponization of air and breathing took the form of police forces using tear gas and other toxicants against demonstrators with increasing frequency. Although international protocols and agreements, from the Geneva Protocol of 1925 to the Biological Weapons Convention of 1972 and the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention, have prohibited the use of toxic gas and airborne germs as a method of warfare, chemical weapons were used in all major conflicts, including the Vietnam War where the spraying of Agent Orange led to long-lasting health incapacitation. As for marketization, the 1970s saw the emergence of a “breathfulness industry” ascribing therapeutic value to conscious respiration. Reiki breathing, opening one’s chakra, and aligning with one’s inner self became all the rage, and the business of breathing extended to all ages and social categories.

Not everybody is equal in front of breathing: “we are all breathers, but none of the same kind.” It is the author’s guiding principle throughout Breathing Aesthetics that “respiration’s imbrication of vitality and morbidity is differently felt by differently situated people.” Control over the means of respiration is unevenly distributed. When breathing is in order, an invisible line is dividing the haves and the have nots, the fully capable and the respiratorily impaired. This is not an intuitive argument: nothing is more free than air, and everybody in good health can afford to breathe regardless of condition of wealth or social status. The distributive effects of breathing impediments are indeed a matter of debate. For some scholars, global warming or airborne pollution are the great equalizers as they affect the whole of humanity without consideration for political or class borders. The burning of coal in Beijing, China, affects cities as far as Tokyo, Seoul, or Hanoi, and the carbon dioxide emissions liberated by Chinese powerplants have consequences for the entire planet. But for Tremblay, “toxicity does discriminate, and it does know boundaries.” In the United States, respiratory hazards and their pathologies, from asthma to lung cancer, are disproportionately concentrated in areas populated by low-income minorities, which amounts to structural and environmental racism. The respiratory enmeshment of vitality and morbidity is particularly acute in situation where the taken-for-granted nature of breathing is compromised by health or environmental conditions. As the lack of mechanical ventilators in American hospitals demonstrated, the still-ongoing Covid-19 pandemic is a crisis of breathing. Many of the symptoms associated with Covid-19 are respiratory, from cough to shortness of breath to loss of smell; complications such as pneumonia and acute respiratory distress syndrome also imperil breathing. We live in an age in which respiration can be put at risk, and where the material conditions of breathing require sustained investment.

Race and respiration

In Tremblay’s analysis, breathlessness imposes itself as a locus of colonial violence, racial discrimination, patriarchal oppression, and ecological degradation. The United States owes its existence to the single largest and most significant land grab in human history. In addition to deliberate killings and wars, Native Americans died in massive numbers from infections endemic among Europeans. Much of this was associated with respiratory tract infections, including smallpox, tuberculosis, measles, and influenza. This history of dispossession and debilitation continued well into the twentieth century: the nuclear tests that took place on US soil near Indian reservations or in evacuated atolls of the Pacific have contributed to abnormally high thyroid and lung cancer rates among Indigenous populations. Settler colonialism was also associated with the slave trade and persistent racial exploitation of African Americans. The history of Black asphyxiation began with the drowning of enslaved people thrown overboard by slave ship owners during the Middle Passage to the Americas. Even today, policies aimed at controlling public spaces and preventing urban riots are depriving African Americans of their breathing space and capacity to voice their concerns. The burden of asthma in the United States falls disproportionately on Black, Hispanic and American Indian/Alaska Native people. But being Black or Latinx or Indigenous doesn’t cause asthma: the neighborhood does. Sociologists have shown that noxious and hazardous facilities are concentrated in minority and low-income communities. For some writers-activists, a war is being waged on the urban poor and the colored in America, and this war uses asphyxia and incapacitation to produce disabled bodies and lives cut short. Health disparities and environmental inequality call for environmental justice and redistribution of the means of respiration. Breathing and breathlessness also have a gendered dimension. There is growing evidence that a number of pulmonary diseases affect women differently and with a greater degree of severity than men. Childbirth labor involves respiratory techniques such as belly breathing and pushing for birth delivery. Part of the feminist movement’s ambition in the 1970s and 1980s was to “remove the man-made obstacles to breathing” and to claim the affinity between the feminine and the natural world while identifying breath as a conduit for intimacy between the two.

In Breathing Aesthetics, Tremblay addresses this politics of breathing tangentially. He defines a breathing aesthetics as a distinct mode of artistic creation and expression that takes breathing as its medium. Breathing is part of the aesthetic experience: according to Tremblay, breathing is “a mode of spectatorship in the same class as watching or listening.” Some works of art demand a certain type of breathing. They impose upon their public a certain kind of inspiring and expiring, controlling respiratory movements to produce a shared affect or breath. Common expressions reflect this affinity between respiration and the art experience A spectacle can be breathtaking, we may hold our breath at the end of a chapter, a story may leave us gaping for air, or we may fill our lungs in full appreciation of a beautiful scene. Critics have already commented upon literature’s engagement with breath: according to François-Bernard Michel, a French writer and pneumologist, Marcel Proust exhibited a literary sensibility to the weather because he suffered from asthma, and Raymond Queneau gave life to asthmatic characters because he was allergic to grass pollen. Cinema is the art form that shows the strongest connexion with the respiratory function. A movie can embark the public on a rollercoaster of laughing, crying, panting, and other respiratory emotions. Jean-Luc Godard’s A bout de souffle was about breathlessness and freedom to breathe as much as it is about challenging Hollywood to create a New Wave of cinema. Music also has a strong affinity with breath: wind instruments and brass are operated by blowing air through the mouthpiece and opening or closing holes to change the pitch. To conceive of music solely as a listening experience is to miss the point: hearing is passive, static, and detached from emotions; it hardly involves the body. Breathing, by contrast, brings the listener closer to the rhythm and harmonies played on stage. In the visual arts, some contemporary artists have taken air, smoke, and clouds as their primary material. Air sculptures are as unusual as they are ethereal, standing at the edge of materiality and drawing the public’s attention to lived and natural environments.

Minoritarian artworks and minority artists

It is Tremblay’s hypothesis that “since the 1970s, writers, filmmakers, and artists have experimented with breathing with extraordinary frequency.” Breathing Aesthetics presents itself as a series of attentive readings shedding light on the challenges of writing in the times of environmental crisis and social upheaval. The author devotes most of his attention to “minoritarian works created by marginalized figures who tend to contest the genre and media conventions traditionally valorized by artistic and academic institutions.” He uses the term “minoritarian” to refer “not to fixed positions but to an impulse, be it artistic or analytic, to contest the forces that make the world more breathable for some people than for others.” The artists and artworks curated in the book haven’t been chosen at random. Their engagement with breathing and breathlessness was a necessary condition, but another condition was their position as “minoritarian”, meaning here a circulation outside the commercial art circuit for the artworks and a belonging to ethnic or sexual minorities for the artists. The 1970s were a time when women, gays and lesbians, and ethnic minorities hadn’t acquired or been granted the visibility they have in today’s art world. To be an artist and a woman, let alone a non-white woman, was seen as problematic. It is said that the last heated exchange between Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta and her husband Carl Andre, prior to her defenestration (presented as an accident or a suicide), was about the lack of artistic recognition she was receiving as opposed to her husband’s success. Of the BDSM couple Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose, art history mostly remembers the male performance artist who “nailed his penis to a plank” and whose disability condition (he was suffering from cystic fibrosis) indeed connected his art to breathing and breathlessness. Of Sheree Rose we know little, and her memoirs remain unpublished. Most of the authors surveyed in the book are women, although they tend to steer away from mainstream feminism and its insistence of a feminine “breath of life.” The minoritarian voices connected to Indigenous knowledge, Black feminism, or ecological awareness rely on respiratory rituals as tactics or strategies for living through the foreclosure of political presents and futures. Breathing together, or developing respiratory asynchrony, have inspired contingent models of social and political life that are contesting “the forces that make the world more breathable for some people than for others.”

Throughout the book, the author posits that ”respiration renders vitality and morbidity inseparable.” Individuals tend to notice breathing and air when those no longer fulfill their life-giving and life-sustaining functions: “becoming conscious of our breathing confronts us with our finitude.” Some people believe that there is a finite number of breaths that one is allowed to take during one’s life: each breath brings us closer to death, and to exhale is to die a little. The French call “la petite mort” the spiritual release that comes with orgasm, or indeed with the encounter of great works of literature as described by Roland Barthes. A little death is also when something dies in you: lung cells die with every breath we take and cannot be regenerated. The entanglement between respiration and morbidity is magnified in the last breath that is supposed to separate life from death. Of course, things are not so simple: biological death has several definitions, from the cessation of brain activity to the irreversible stopping of heart and lung functions, and a person can be maintained under artificial respiration while being brain dead. Some TV series indeed play with this ambiguous passage by staging “last breath” moments that prove not to be final, causing bereaved families and the public to burst into involuntary laughter. According to Tremblay, “the fantasy that in the last breath the dying individual encounters finitude on their own terms fulfills a social function”: it introduces an unambiguous demarcation between life and death, helping survivors to part with the deceased and to go on with their lives. The last chapter of Breathing Aesthetics documents this rite of passage by analyzing two documentaries that take palliative care and the management of death in public hospitals at their main topic. Capturing the last breath poses many technical and philosophical issues: the last breath can only be named as such retroactively, and the persons involved have to give their informed consent to this breach of intimacy. Released before the advent of the Internet and social media, the two reality movies, Near Death (1989) and Dying at Grace (2003), anticipate a time when the last moments of beloved ones are recorded live on camera and the scene of death, with its last breath and stopping electrocardiogram beeping, become public events.

The politics of breathing

I have initially titled my book review “I can’t breathe,” the rallying cry of the Black Lives Matter movement. But here I stand and hesitate: should I keep this title? I used it as an easy moniker only to catch readers’ attention and to echo the book’s concern with the devaluation of Black lives in the United States today. But of course, I can breathe, and I don’t feel privileged about that one bit. This separates me from the author, who tends to consider his own whiteness as a privilege. Throughout Breathing Aesthetics, Jean-Thomas Tremblay is only interested in inequality insofar as it intersects with race, gender, sexual orientation, and (dis)ability. The analytical tools that he mobilizes are “feminist, queer, and trans, for those are the categories, along with race and ethnicity, that expose the constitution and construction of bodies.” Note that critical theory, along Marxist or continental philosophy lines, is not mentioned in the author’s toolbox. Disparities of wealth and class distinctions are not addressed. The reason we (they) can’t breathe is to be found in identity politics, not class warfare or social inequalities. It is not a matter of rich people stealing fresh air from poor people’s lungs, but of some categories being denied their fair share of breathing. Slogans should therefore be used carefully in order to avoid illegitimate racial appropriations. Tremblay warns against “the denial of structural and environmental racism” by the anti-mask campaigners who appropriated the “I can’t breathe” slogan to protest against mask-wearing and other Covid-related restrictions. He himself confesses that he took part in the demonstrations denouncing police violence in Chicago, but that he kept silent when BLM militants were chanting “I can’t breathe” and “we can’t breathe.” He recognizes he felt breathless at the time but that “his breathlessness couldn’t be equated with the breathlessness of protesters asphyxiated by environmental racism, police violence, or microaggressions.” As a French national with no connexion whatsoever to the United States, I have even less skin in the game. But I would be more ready than Jean-Thomas Tremblay to use the denunciation of breathlessness as a rallying cry because I believe our breathing condition should bring us together and not take us apart along identitarian lines. If a politics of air redistribution is to be put in place, it should be based on a universal right to breathe and grant equal access to breathable air, regardless of skin color or other marks of identity definition. Of all the works of art surveyed in Breathing Aesthetics, the one I feel the closest with is the music video “Breathing” from British pop singer Kate Bush, although this is the one that the author deems most compromised by its whiteness and lack of minoritarian impulse.

Remnants of “La Coopération”

1 May 20219 Jun 2022 Etienne RPLeave a comment

**A review of Edges of Exposure. Toxicology and the Problem of Capacity in Postcolonial Senegal, Noémi Tousignant, Duke University Press, 2018.**

Edges of Exposure Capacity building is the holy grail of development cooperation. It refers to the process by which individuals and organizations as well as nations obtain, improve, and retain the skills, knowledge, tools, equipment, and other resources needed to achieve development. Like a scaffolding, official development assistance is only a temporary fixture; it pursues the goal of making itself irrelevant. The partner country, it insists, needs to be placed in the driver’s seat and implement its domestically-designed policies on its own terms. Once capacity is built and the development infrastructure is in place, technical assistance is no longer needed. National programs, funded by fiscal resources and private capital, can pursue the task of development and pick up from where foreign experts and ODA projects left off. And yet, in most cases, building capacity proves elusive. The landscape of development cooperation is filled with failed projects, broken-down equipment, useless consultant reports, and empty promises. Developing countries are playing catch-up with an ever receding target. As local experts master skills and technologies are transferred, new technologies emerge and disrupt existing practices. Creative destruction wreaks havoc fixed capacity and accumulated capital. Development can even be destructive and nefarious. The ground on which the book opens, the commune of Ngagne Diaw near Senegal’s capital city Dakar, is made toxic by the poisonous effluents of used lead-acid car batteries that inhabitants process to recycle heavy metals and scrape a living. Other locations in rural areas are contaminated with stockpiles of pesticides that have leaked into soil and water ecosystems.

Playing catch-up with a moving target

Edges of Exposure is based on an eight-month period of intensive fieldwork that Noémi Tousignant spent by establishing residence in the toxicology department of Université Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar, in an ecotoxicological project center, and in the newly-established Centre Anti-Poison, Senegal’s national poison control center. The choice to study the history of toxicology in Senegal through the accumulation of capacity in these three institutions was justified by the opportunity they offered to the social scientist: toxicity, that invisible scourge that surfaced in the disease outbreaks of “toxic hotspots” such as Ngagne Diaw, was made visible and exposed as an issue of national concern by the scientists and equipments that tried to measure it and control its spread. Layers of equipments that have accumulated in these two locations appear as “leftovers of unpredictable transfers of analytical capacity originating in the Global North.” Writing about history, but using the tools of anthropology and ethnographic fieldwork, the author combines the twin methods of archeology and genealogy. The first is about examining the material and discursive traces left by the past in order to understand “the meaning this past acquires from and gives to the present.” The second is an investigation into those elements we tend to feel are without history because they cannot be ordered into a narrative of progress and accomplishment, such as toxicity and technical capacity.

Noémi Tousignant begins with a material history of the buildings, equipments, and archives left onsite by the successive waves of capacity building campaigns. The book cover picturing the analytical chemistry laboratory sets the stage for the ongoing narrative, with its rows of unused teaching benches, chipped tiles, rusty gas taps, and handwritten signs instructing not to use the water spigots. The various measurement equipments, sample freezers, and portable testing kits are mostly in disrepair or unused, and local staff describe them as “antiques,” “remnants,” or leftovers of a “wreckage.” They provide evidence of a “process of ruination” by which capacity was acquired, maintained, and lost or destroyed. The buildings of Cheikh Anta Diop university—named after the scholar who first claimed the African origins of Egyptian civilization—speak of a time of high hopes and ambitions. The various departments, “toxicology,” “pharmacology,” “organic chemistry,” are arranged in neat fashion, and each unit envisions an optimistic future of scientific advancement, public health provision, and economic development. The toxicology lab is supposed to perform a broad range of functions, from medico-legal expertise to the testing of food quality and suspicious substances and to the monitoring of indicators of exposure and contamination. But in the lab, technicians complained that “nothing worked” and that outside requests for sample testing had to be turned down. Research projects and advanced degrees could only be completed overseas. Capacity was only there as infrastructure and equipment sedimented over time and now largely deactivated.

Sediments of cooperation

Based on her observations and interviews, Noémi Tousignant reconstructs three ages of capacity building in Senegalese toxicology, from the golden era of “la coopération” to the financially constrained period of “structural adjustment” and to a time of bricolage and muddling through. The Faculty of Pharmacy was created as part of the post-independence extension of pharmacy education from a technical degree to the full state qualification, on par with a French degree. For several decades after the independence, the French government provided technical assistants, equipment, budget, and supplies with the commitment to maintain “equivalent quality” with French higher education. The motivation was only partly altruistic and also self-serving: the university was put under French leadership, with key posts occupied by French coopérants, and throughout the 1960s about a third of its students were French nationals. It allowed children of the many French expats in Senegal to begin their degree in Dakar and easily transfer to French universities, and also provided technical assistants with career opportunities that could be later translated into good positions in the metropole. France was clearly in the driver’s seat, and Senegalese scientists and technicians were invited to join the bandwagon. But the belief in equivalent expertise and convergent development embodied in la coopération also bore the promise of a national and sovereign future for Senegal and opened the possibility of African membership in a universal modernity of technical norms and expertise. Coopérants’ teaching and research activities were temporary by definition: they were meant to produce the experts and cadres that would replace them.

The genealogy of the toxicology discipline itself delineates three periods within French coopération: from post-colonial science to modern state-building and to Africanization. The first French professor to occupy the chair of pharmaceutical chemistry and toxicology in Dakar described in his speeches and writings “a luxuriant Africa in which poison abounds and poisoning rites are highly varied.” His interest for traditional poisons and pharmacopeia was not only motivated by the lure of exoticism: “tropical toxicology” could analyze African plant-based poisons to solve crimes, maintain public order, and identify potentially lucrative substances. In none of his articles published between 1959 and 1963 did the French director mention the toxicologist’s role in preventing toxic exposure or mitigating its effects on a population level. His successors at the university maintained French control but reoriented training and research to fulfill national construction needs. They acquired equipment and developed methods to measure traces of lead and mercury in Senegalese fish, blood, water, and hair, while arguing that toxicology was needed in Senegal to accompany intensified production in fishing and agriculture. But they did not emphasize the environmental or public health significance of these tests, and their research did not contribute to the strengthening of regulation at the national and regional level. Africanization, which was touted as an long-term objective since the time of the independence, was only achieved with the abrupt departure of the last French director in 1983 and its replacement with Senegalese researchers who had obtained their doctoral degree in France. But it coincided with the adoption of structural adjustment programs and their translation into budget cuts, state sector downsizing, and shifting priorities toward the private sector.

After la coopération

Ties with France were not severed: a few technical assistants remained, equipment was provided on an ad hoc basis, and Senegalese faculty still relied on their access to better-equipped French labs during their doctoral research or for short-term “study visits.” But the activation of these links came to rely more on the continuation of friendly relations and favors than on state-supported programs and entitlements. French universities donated second-hand equipment and welcomed young African scientists to fill needed positions in their research teams. They made the occasional favor of testing samples that could no longer be analyzed with the broken-down equipment in Dakar. The toxicology department at Cheikh Anta Diop University could not keep up with advances in science and technology, with the emergence of automated analytical systems and genetic toxicology that made cutting-edge research more expensive and thus less accessible to modestly funded public institutions. Some modern machines were provided by international aid agencies as part of transnational projects to monitor the concentration of heavy metals, pesticides, and aflatoxins—accumulated often as the result of previous ill-advised development projects such as the large-scale spraying of pesticides in the Sahel to combat locust and grasshopper invasions. But, as Tousignant notes, such scientific instruments “are particularly prone to disrepair, needing constant calibration, adjustments, and often a steady supply of consumables.” The “project machines” provided the capacity to test for the presence of some of the toxins in food and the environment, but they did not translate into regulatory measures and soon broke down because of lack of maintenance.

The result of this “wreckage” is a landscape filled with antique machinery, broken dreams, and “nostalgia for the futures” that the infrastructures and equipment promised. Abandoned by the state, some research scientists and technicians left for the private sector and now operate from consultancy bureaus, local NGOs, and private labs with good foreign connections. Others continue to uphold the ideal of science as a public service and try to attract contract work or are occasionally enlisted in transnational collaborative projects. Students and researchers initiate low-cost, civic-minded “research that can solve problems,” collecting samples of fresh products, powdered milk, edible oils, and generic drugs to test for their quality and composition. Meanwhile, the government of Senegal has ratified a series of international conventions bearing the names of European metropoles—Basel, Rotterdam, Stockholm—addressing global chemical pollution and regulating the trade of hazardous wastes and pesticides. Western NGOs such as Pure Earth are mapping “toxic hotspots” such as Ngagne Diaw and are contracting with the Dakar toxicology lab to provide portable testing kits and measure lead concentration levels in soil and blood. Entreprising state pharmacologists and medical doctors have invested an unused wing of Hôpital Fan on the university campus to create a national poison control center, complete with a logo and an organizational chart but devoid of any equipment. Its main activity is a helpline to respond to people bitten by poisonous snakes.

Testing for testing’s sake

Toxicology monitoring now seems to be submitted to the imperatives of global health and environmental science. Western donors and private project contractors are interested in the development of an African toxicological science only insofar as it can provide the data point, heatmaps, and early warning systems for global monitoring. The protection and healing of populations should be the ultimate goal, and yet the absence of a regulatory framework, let alone a functional enforcement capacity, guarantees that people living in toxic environments will be left on their own. In such conditions, what’s the point of monitoring for monitoring’s sake? “Ultimately, the struggle for toxicological capacity seems largely futile, unable to generate protective knowledge other than fragments, hopes, and fictions.” But, as Noémi Tousignant argues, these are “useful fictions.” First, the maintenance of minimal monitoring capacity, and the presence of dedicated experts, can ensure that egregious cases of “toxic colonialism” such as the illegal dumping of hazardous waste, will not go undetected and unanswered. Against the temptation to consider the lives of the poor as expendable, and to treat Africa as waste, toxicologists can act as a sentinel and render visible some of the harm that populations and ecosystems have to endure. Second, like the layers of abandoned equipment that documents the futures that could have been, toxicologists highlight the missed opportunity of protection. “They affirm, even if only indirectly, the possibility of—and the legitimacy of claims to—a protective biopolitics of poison in Africa.”

Trinidad’s Carbon Footprint

10 Jan 2021 Etienne RPLeave a comment

**A review of Energy without Conscience. Oil, Climate Change, and Complicity, David McDermott Hughes, Duke University Press, 2017.**

Energy without conscience As a small state composed of two islands off the coast of Venezuela, Trinidad and Tobago is heavily exposed to the risk of climate change. It is vulnerable to the rise in sea levels, increased flooding, extreme weather events, hillside erosion and the loss of coastal habitats, all of which are manifestations of the continued progression of climate change. Rising sea levels and temperatures will also impact its economy, vegetation and fauna, health, and living conditions, to the point of making current livelihoods wiped out. But there is another side to the story of climate change in this small island state. Trinidad and Tobago ranks fourth globally in per capita emissions of carbon dioxide. Each of the 1.2 million inhabitants of the two islands emitted, on average, 31.3 tons of CO2 in 2017, six times the world average. Unbeknownst to the public, who tends to associate this island paradise with beach resorts, rum-based concoctions, and calypso music, Trinidad and Tobago is an oil state, a hydrocarbon economy. In the early 1990s, its hydrocarbon sector moved from an oil-dominant to a mostly natural gas-based sector, and from land-based sites to offshore production. It is now the largest oil and natural gas producer in the Caribbean, the world’s sixth-largest LNG exporter, and the largest LNG exporter to the United States, accounting for nearly 71% of US LNG imports in 2014. If we include the carbon emissions of the oil, gas, and petrol products it sells overseas, Trinidad’s carbon footprint is disproportionately large. When it comes to climate change, Trinidad and Tobago is all at once victim and perpetrator, innocent and guilty, passive object and active subject. How do its inhabitants and its political leaders react to this situation?

Victim and accomplice

The answer is, in short, denial. To the dismal of David M. Hughes, who spent a year around 2010 conducting interviews with petroleum geologists, oil and gas executives, and environmentalists, the majority of his informants simply didn’t seem to care about carbon emissions and their impact on climate. When they did care, as in the wake of hurricanes, droughts and fires that affected the country at that time, it was to posit the island state as a victim of climate change, claiming compensation and redress from richer countries. Victimhood constitutes a “slot” in the sense that anthropologists give to the term when they refer to the “savage slot” or the “tribal slot.” To quote from Hughes, “the victim slot artificially clarifies an inherently murky moral situation. It whitewashes – as innocent – societies, firms and industrial sectors otherwise clearly complicit with carbon emissions and climate change.” History predisposed Trinidadians to that role: as victims of colonialism, of the slave trade, and of the plantation economy, Trinidad’s inhabitants naturally associate themselves with other island populations that have been victimized by the history of imperialism and the modern contempt for small states. Diplomats used this chord to initiate an alliance of like-minded states in climate negotiations, eventually giving birth to the concept of SIDS or Small Island Developing States. The irony is that Trinidad and Tobago is neither a “developing state”—according to the World Bank, it falls into the “high income” category—nor an innocent victim of climate change when it comes to per capita emissions.

Another strategy of denial is to act in bad faith, to take the term popularized by Jean-Paul Sartre. By silence and omission, Trinidad diplomats and policy leaders were able to pair with the vulnerable victims of climate change. When they took the floor in international fora, it was to claim moral superiority and victim status. “We are the conscience of the world when it comes to climate issues,” declared the environment minister on behalf of small island states. Prime Minister Patrick Manning obfuscated critiques when confronted with the high figures of per capita emissions. “The atmosphere does not respond to per capita emissions,” he repeated whenever relevant. “It only responds to absolute emissions.” In absolute terms, “we emit very little,” officials claimed, quoting the figure of 0.1 percent of global carbon emissions per year. They invoked the principle of historical responsibility to shift the blame away from developing nations: rich countries are mostly to blame for past emissions, and they should pay for their accumulated contributions to global warming. Historical responsibility, like per capita emissions, are a bone of contention in climate change negotiations. They raise legitimate questions, but they also conceal as much as they illuminate. According to Hughes, the category of victimhood redeems its sufferers in an almost Christian fashion: “It allows good people to do bad things in the biosphere.” For him, it is more relevant to consider the category of “high emitting individuals” who are present in all countries and who, taken together, number about one billion people and are responsible for the bulk of carbon emissions.

Taking sides

In conducting his research in Trinidad, David M. Hughes was in a peculiar position. Anthropologists are often supposed to take sides: for the tribe they observe against the dominant society that encroaches on their livelihoods, for the colonized against the colonizers, for the local resistance against the global empire. They want to protect the livelihoods of the natives against the onslaught of cultural modernity and social change. Hughes takes the reverse position: for him, the oil and gas industry should go extinct. Exploiting hydrocarbons is both immoral and irresponsible. The core business of any oil company damages the whole world. Oil firms should be consigned to an ash heap, worthy of condescension and worse. When burned in large volumes, hydrocarbons wreak havoc and endanger the planet. In a petrostate, the objectives of sustainability and resilience are turned on their head: the status quo is not an available option. To mitigate climate change, Trinidad and all the petrostates will need to replace the paradigm of hydrocarbons with sustainable forms of energy and economic activity. The idea of peak oil and the depletion of oil reserves makes this energy transition necessary, but we should not simply wait for oil and gas to run out before taking action on the climate. Proven reserves greatly exceed what the atmosphere can safely absorb before 2050. The role of ethnography should be, in this case, to study the enemy and document how they think, act, and feel in order to combat them. Hughes divides the Trinidad population into three groups: the engineers and executives who directly depend on the oil and gas industry; the middle- and upper-class urbanites who depend on the oil infrastructure without giving it a thought; and the poorer part of the population, including the inhabitants of Tobago, who have a minimal footprint in terms of energy consumption and carbon dioxide emission.

And so Hughes became an activist or engaged ethnographer. His political agenda was to challenge people’s complicity with climate change and to raise public concerns about carbon emissions and fossil fuel. He used his contacts in the oil and gas industry to corner people into conversations they did not wish to hold, exposing their omissions and contradictions. Along with other environmental activists, he participated in a round of public consultations on the country’s first policy regarding climate change. He raised the issue of per capita emissions repeatedly and suggested that the policy document include targets for cutting them. He suggested Trinidad identify less with Tuvalu or the Maldives and more with Bahrain, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. To become a carbon-neutral destination, Trinidad would have to radically change its business model, exiting from the oil and gas industry and developing renewable energies such as solar and wind power. But the energy transition was seen more as a threat than as an opportunity by Trinidad’s industrialists who saw the substitution of oil and gas with wind and solar energy as a form of “aboveground risk” on a par with sabotage or nationalization. The anthropologist-turned-activist did find some environmentally-minded people and joined their fight against a proposed aluminum smelter that would have constituted a threat to the environment and human health. The activists defeated the smelter itself, but they acquiesced to the adjoining power plant, the complex’s only emitter of carbon dioxide. Even the most free-thinking Trinis failed to criticize the principle of burning oil and gas itself.

Oil culture

Trinidad’s society is suffused with oil, and yet hydrocarbons are relatively absent from art and culture. Around 1850, Michel-Jean Cazabon, the first great Trinidadian painter and internationally known artist, made sketches of Pitch Lake with heavy asphalt bubbling on the surface. Trinidad is also the place where the world’s first continually productive oil well was drilled in 1866. In both world wars, Trinidad’s oil propelled British and Allied forces. After independence in 1962, the country developed its gas sector, becoming a major exporter of downstream products such as methanol and plastics. Belying the resource curse that has plagued other countries, oil has given Trinidad and Tobago economic stability and political sovereignty. The island’s two Nobel laureates, V.S. Naipaul and Derek Walcott, do not address the oil industry in their writings—there is a dearth of petro-novels or oil fictions globally—but their characterization of Trinidad as a small and forlorn country did play a role in the cultivation of victimhood that characterizes modern attitudes to climate change. No official in Port of Spain is accepting partial responsibility for climate change. Provocatively, Hughes posits that Trinidad could assume its part of greatness and leadership if it acknowledged its status as one of the world’s largest per capita emitter of greenhouse gases. But he knows this is not going to happen. The country, like the rest of the planet, is stuck with oil and doesn’t want to claim responsibility for the wrongs it produces. The victim paradigm reigns supreme: environmental change is presented as something we all suffer passively, rather than actively influence.

Things weren’t meant to be that way. There were times when energy pricked the conscience of individuals. Hughes describes the successive energy transitions that characterized Trinidad’s history, highlighting the moral choices and the roads not taken. In the 1740s, the Jesuit Joseph Gumilla proposed developing a tropical colony built on abundant sunlight and fertile soil. Josef Chacon, the last governor for Spain before the English took power in 1797, encouraged settlers from neighboring French Caribbean islands, to come and grow sugar cane. Calculating the inputs necessary for agricultural productivity, he factored in slave labor and plantation managers but entirely omitted sunlight or other forms of energy. Plantation slaves were the first fuel, the first transatlantic flow of energy, whose exploitation meant the obliteration of conscience. In the early 1860s, Conrad Stollmeyer, a German immigrant, also proposed an utopian colony, a “paradise without labor” where humans were replaced by machines to be powered by sun, wind, and other tropical forces. But his utopian dreams soon faded and instead the German engineer developed a technology to transform heavy asphalt into kerosene, finding a new way to fuel the economy in addition to somatic power and natural energy. As this short history shows, people have already suggested the abandonment of former sources of energy and the adoption of new ones. What if Trinidad had developed into a natural colony based on abundant sunlight and water, or if mechanized agriculture had substituted to indentured labor and the need to bring in slaves? There were solutions that predated the problems, and we could return to them if only as a form of counterfactual speculation.

Energy without conscience

The title of Hughes’ book echoes Rabelais’ famous quotation: “science without conscience is but ruination of the soul.” According to environment science, energy without conscience leads to the ruin of the planet. But what could energy with conscience be? Hughes suggests that we should apply to energy consumption the same moral lenses that we once applied to slave labor: “oil might become the new slavery.” Burning oil constitutes a form of environmental injustice and human structural violence. It is not fair to say that we are all complicit in this endeavor: some people consume energy less than others, and the blame should be accrued first to persons and corporations responsible for the largest emissions. But energy with conscience should not be just about putting blame and calling for climate justice. If climate change is to become a moral issue, it has to be framed into imaginaries and narratives as powerful as the ones that maintain the status quo. In his conclusion, Hughes notes that slavery gave a bad name to physical labor or somatic power: “it may be particularly difficult in Trinidad, the United States, and other postemancipation societies to propose muscle as a performer of work.” In public consultations, his proposal to establish bicycle lanes in Port of Spain was met with skepticism. And yet it is a mixture of brains and brawn, of ideas and effort, that may take the islands of this world out of their complicity with oil and climate change.

Straight From the Gut

16 Aug 202011 Sep 2020 Etienne RPLeave a comment

**A review of Animate Planet: Making Visceral Sense of Living in a High-Tech Ecologically Damaged World, Kath Weston, Duke University Press, 2017.**

Although published in a book series high in theory octane, Kath Weston is not interested in theory. She prefers to tell stories. She is mischievous about it: in a field where theory is everywhere and academics have to live by their theoretical word, she plays with theory like a kitten plays with yarn. She wiggles it, unrolls it, shuffles it around, drags it across the floor, and turns it into a story. For stories is what she is interested in. Of course, as she herself acknowledges, “in an era when ‘post-‘ is all the rage and everyone reaches for a beyond,” she cannot ignore postmodernism, posthumanism, postcolonialism, new feminisms, the narrative shift, or the ontological turn. Or, being published by Duke University Press (and handpicked by its editor, Ken Wissoker), vibrant matter, animacies, new materialisms, the affective turn, everyday intimacies, experimental futures, global insecurities, and new ecologies (to quote book titles or series from the same press.) But she knows her strength lies in storytelling, not theory-making or abstract criticism. She realizes her book will be remembered for the stories she tells (or for the haunting book cover she selected), not for the theories she discusses or the concepts she forges. She uses references to the academic literature, especially in endnotes, to make clear that her book should not be considered as fiction or reportage, but as an attempt, as the subtitle puts it, to make “visceral sense of living in a high-tech ecologically damaged world.” She avoids ontological claims or conclusions: when she elaborates on animates and intimacies, she explores contemporary ways of living—and not ontology-based corrections of an error called modernity.

Bedtime stories

Animate Planet begins with a bedtime story. Its meaning is rather confusing: there is a before and an after, inanimate agents with capital letters (such as Alienation and Capital), birds and humans (such as in the picture on the book cover), lords and lieges, turtles and sea otters, glass castles and islands, forests and deserts, water and ice. The whole seems oddly familiar and yet alien, as in the liminal state of consciousness when bedtime stories are told, as the mind drifts into sleeping and imagination roams free. This is, as the author tells, modernity’s story, the dream in which we are caught and from which we may never awaken. It is a story of ecological destruction, resource depletion, rising sea levels, disappearing species, damaged habitats, and inevitable disaster. This initial folk tale is to be followed by many other stories, drawn from anthropological literature or from the author’s own research. Most stories adopt a language of crisis and catastrophe, of precariousness and destitution; some stories end with a more positive ring, as they develop ways to live in an increasingly inhabitable planet. They take us to places as diverse as northern India suffering from drought and water pollution, Japan living under the spell of Fukushima, and Navajo reserves marketing homeland products in the United States. Four main families of stories emerge, linked to the themes spelled out at the beginning of each chapter: food; energy; climate change; and water.

The story of food starts in a Californian school where pupils were mandated to wear an identification badge containing a radio frequency identification transmitter, or RFID. In the United States, RFID technology is widely used to track cattle in the agribusiness industry. It responds to the perceived need to trace animal products “from farm to fork” and to connect the consumer to the processed commodity, beyond species exploitation and labor alienation. We ask technologies to supply the intimate knowledge that people have long derived from direct contact and interactions. This “techno-intimacy” is especially relevant for the way we connect with food (we need “food stories” to consume a particular wine or dish), with animals (“Wir geben Fleisch ein Gesischt,” advertises a German farm producer) and with children (although the RFID badge project in the Californian school was finally abandoned.) Under the guise of biosecurity, US agencies track livestock and poultry to secure the food supply chain and prevent epidemics, even while farm inspection budgets are being cut and meatpacking regulations are being loosened. We grant nationality to animals (“US beef”) even while we deny it to undocumented immigrants. As the author records, “a cow in the United States might have as many as five different identification codes associated with it, each keyed to a different program.” Meanwhile, genetically modified organisms enter the food chain without any regulation or tracking. The techno-intimacies that are experimented on animals find their ways into social applications designed to track humans and monitor their behavior.

Japan’s radiation moms

Kath Weston was in Tokyo in March 2011 when the great earthquake, tsunami, and Fukushima catastrophe took place. Every day brought news of fresh radioactive releases and monitoring radiation became part of daily life, with new benchmarks and units such as megabecquerels (MBq), millisieverts (mSv), or counts per minute (CPM). For every measurement that the government sponsored, activists associated with the small but growing antinuclear movement created one of their own. People with no particular technical training would take technology into their own hands and equip themselves with Geiger counters and other portable electronic devices. The Internet became the preferred medium for circulating the results of grassroots radiation monitoring that appeared in the form of crowdsourced radiation maps and databases. Meanwhile, “radiation moms” took the habit of taking their Geiger counter to the market and scanning their rice and seaweed before preparing dinner. For Kath Weston, the blurring of lines between bodies, technologies, and contaminated ecologies creates a “bio-intimacy” in which humans incorporate contaminating elements into their daily lives. Treating the body as something to be protected from an environment imagined as “out there” makes no sense: the surrounding milieu is already part of the body and reconfigures it through absorbed radiations, chemicals, and poisonous substances. The pollution of our environment creates unwanted intimacy with invisible matter that creeps into our cellular fabric and alters its physiology.

The chapter on climate change begins with the story of climate skeptics for whom “it doesn’t feel hotter these days.” People have always used their body in order to decode shifts in both wether and climate, and talking about the weather has always been a favorite topic of conversation. Trusting the body makes scientific sense: it is part of the “visceral” knowledge referred to in the book’s title. Bodies have long been integral to scientific inquiry: Marie and Pierre Curie exposed themselves to radium burns and took precise measurement of the lesions produced, and the geneticist J. B. S. Haldane wrote an essay “On Being One’s Own Rabbit” in which he recounted using his body for experiments. This being told, bodily sensations are a poor instrument for assessing climate change: perceptions are fleeting and subjective, and they can not monitor shifts that take place on a yearly basis or at the scale of decades, if not centuries. The important point is to link bodily observations with broader narratives generated by climate science: this way, body sensations can assume evidential status, and scientific evidence of climate change can make visceral sense and generate political engagement. Weather reports now use the notion of “felt temperature” or “bio-weather” to tell people what effects they might experience in their bodies. This kind of bio-intimacy with temperature, humidity, wind, and hydration is as important and no less scientific than objective measurement. Referring to the useful data generated by bird watchers who record migratory patterns, Kath Weston calls for a grassroots climate science that would mobilize the potential of citizen science and amateur observation to document an increasingly damaged planet.

Holy water

Water in some parts of India is so polluted that even birds reject tap water and drink only from the filtered water that is offered to them. Many rivers can only be described as “sewers”, and most household equip themselves with water filtration systems. Meanwhile, a water-and-architecture extravaganza called the Grand Venice has been built in the Greater Noida suburb of New Delhi. The real estate development project advertises “eco” features for visitors and residents, allowing them to cultivate a spiritual connection with water that is constitutive to Indian culture; but the gondola rides and cascade fountains come at the price of severe strain on water resources and energy consumption. Water from the tap in ordinary households comes laden with heavy minerals and is incompatible with life; while water in the Grand Venice shopping mall quenches people’s inherent need for spectacle and entertainment. Kath Weston reminds us that in the urban ghettoes of the United States, people have always opened fire hydrants in the streets in hot summer to play around; similarly, in monsoon regions like northern India, people rush outside as soon as rain comes and raise their faces to the sky to greet the first raindrops. The transformation of Indian rivers into sewer canals gives rise to scatological humor and lively public protests. Drawing on Russian linguist Mikhail Bakhtin, she calls this drive for fun and merriment the “carnivalesque” and considers it fair play.

The destruction of the planet has been amply documented. But ecological consciousness doesn’t lead to political action. As Kath Weston asks, “What does it mean to know but not to grasp, to have realization end in a shrug?” Or, to put it differently, “Knowing what we know, why are we stuck?” Her answer is to substitute intellectual knowledge with a “visceral” sense of living. Some of our thoughts and feelings are deeply entrenched and rooted in our bodily existence. They do not come from the brain or from the heart, but “straight from the gut.” What is visceral is not only human: it also originates from the bacteria and germs that populate our digestive organs and that have a major influence on our metabolism. Viscera are an inter-species composite that forms what scientists describe as the microbiome and that makes us plural: from the perspective of our internal organs, we are multitude. But of course there are risks in advocating a visceral shift toward a more intimate engagement with the world that surrounds us: gut feelings may be wrong and lead us astray. We know what usually comes out from our bowels, and we don’t want to play with it the way we engage with thoughts and emotions. As an example, Kath Weston reminds us of the “new car smell” that car salesmen never failed to point out to convince potential buyers, notwithstanding the fact that the smell came from potentially carcinogenic chemicals such as adhesives and solvents that were used in the production process. Making visceral sense of the world may lead us to the same blunders that have caused our predicament.

The unrelenting power of narratives

Another way to affect behavior and to trigger a spiritual conversion is to tell stories. Narratives stay with us and linger in our memory for a longer time span than do theories. From the fairy tales of our childhood to the myths and legends that form the basis of whole civilizations, we live in a world shaped by stories in which we incidentally take part. Theories are interested in the general and seek to describe the specific in non-specific terms, whereas stories are time- and space-bound. Any theory mistakes the provincial for the universal; it reduces the yet unknown to a particular, provincial conception of things human. It denies the possibility that things could be otherwise than they are; that mutations of the possible might occur that we cannot grasp with our already established ways of thinking and knowing. A theorist already knows (everything). But what if the thing one attempts to think through in terms of this or that theory, in its own dynamic, in its own singular configuration, were such that it actually defies the theory used to explain it? By contrast, narratives start with the recognition that the new and the different is conceptually incommensurable with the already thought and known. They create an intimacy—recall the book’s bio- and techno-intimacies—that makes us familiar with the unknown, the unprecedented, the queer and alien. Even theories can be understood as narratives for the figures they summon, the rhythm they create, and the conclusions they reach. I, for one, read nonfiction books (and particularly books by Duke University Press) as bedtime stories. I am interested in the vistas they open to the world, their openness to the unfamiliar and the unexpected, their capacity to decenter and to displace well-established borders and categories. Theories I read and tend to forget; stories I recall and I revisit. This is why Kath Weston’s Animate Planet, with its stunning book cover and its tapestry of narratives, will linger with me.