hepler Annotations

What does the image convey about “toxic subjects” (their character, dynamics, etc.)? (How) Does this image open up the concept of “toxicity”?

Wednesday, December 5, 2018 - 4:08pm

It strikes me that the first and third images in this series render toxicity differently from the second. This image and the first juxtapose two forms of order. First, there's the order of petrochemical production--long lines of cylindrical tanks capped by OHSA-approved guard rails, cooling towers, pipe clusters running parallel and perpendicular to one another--. Second, there's the order of the residential neighborhood--well-pruned trees, wooden telephone poles, small parks, backyards, vinyl siding. Who knows what's going on behind the veneer of order on both sides of the fence, and the fence itself may be an "ineffective boundary." But the logic of each domain and the boundary between them are clear; the power of the image lies in showing these two highly visually distinct forms of order abutting each other. Toxicity is when industry and domesticity get too close.

The second image, in contrast, juxtaposes two dis-orders: scrap metal in the background, scrub in the foreground, and the muddy bayou (a third dis-order) in between.  Toxicity is where order breaks down and residues run together.

I wonder whether you can read images one and three and image two against each other. Reading one and three in light of two could gesture toward a) the leakages, emissions, exposures, putatively-closed-actually-open systems, and other fissures that run through the ostensible order of one and three. Reading two in light of one and three could situate this disorderly end of the road as a node within broader toxicity-producing infrastructures and logics. This could perhaps help illuminate a full picture of toxicity--the logic by which chemical toxicity is produced, rationalized (in multiple senses), situated adjacent to sites of everyday life, and by which it diffuses across borders--and call attention to the blindered views (images 1 or 3 without image 2; image 2 without images 1 or 3) that make that picture difficult to resolve.

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