Tim Choy’s “Atmospherics: On Substances and Subjects in Suspension”
Comments by Kris Peterson
Anthropology, UC Irvine
kris@uci.edu
In a not yet published manuscript entitled, Ecologies of Comparison, Tim Choy takes air as an
ultimate flexible object, one that must pass through different structures and institutions.
Rather than claiming an assemblage, Choy performs it through the narrative itself. In doing
so he changes the way we take categories comprising air for granted. The way we inhabit the
air around us also changes. And as such we enter a blurry line drawn between meaning and
matter – our connection to the air is a recursive one, always moving through different
materialities.
I start with this yet to be published book because it’s a compelling context for thinking about
what Choy is up to in the circulated manuscript. In moving away from air, Choy works with
the always-emergent yet critical junctures of “atmosphere” or modern air politics. In a slow
motion kind of way, he thinks about the multiple complexities of atmospheric components
and entanglements (simultaneity/singularity, suspension, and substance). Atmosphere is
empirical – it has its parts, its movement, its sedimentation. It can also be an object of
intuition - things felt and sensed that accumulate as collective epistemology and commonhoods. Through the concreteness of air-related illnesses to the tricky potential for a
“vagueness” in politics, actors and their atmospheric objects are strung together in both
obvious and non-obvious ways. He convinces me that all of these things must be accounted
for at once.
For Choy, the “commonsense-ness of multiplicity” where parallel and incompatible analysis,
the co-mingling of multiple scales, and methods of sensing must all remain together inside
this term “atmosphere” or more specifically “suspension.” He emphasizes that there is
nothing arbitrary about this - atmosphere only emerges as an object through these
multiplicities. I am reminded of Canguilhem’s use of the term “milieu.” That is, the
possibility of conceiving objects or organisms not on the basis of mechanical and technical
models but rather on a relationship to the milieu in which they live – that their status is
something greater than the sum of their parts. More recently, Hannah Landecker’s
theorization of American metabolism begs a similar web of integrated mechanisms. In this
work, she moves from classic theories of metabolism to think about food (and air and water)
as a “conditioning environment that shapes the activity of the genome and the physiology
of the body.”
There is something here between the way life itself is becoming newly understood and
conscriptions of data. Choy posits ecopolitical life, “where techniques and forms of
controlling or modulating living and dying … are not replaced so much as displaced.
Displaced, accompanied, and surrounded by questions of relationality [my emphasis]. Modes
and techniques for discerning and forming relations between human and nonhuman worlds
and futures.” Relationality is important and there’s some interesting resonance with recent
developments in the life sciences. I’m thinking here of epigenetics and systems biology,
where knowledge of how we understand the genome, for example, is changing based upon
new understandings of relationality at several registers, including genomic interactions and
the interaction of scientific disciplines.
What are the implications? I use my brother as an example. He’s a molecular biologist who,
in the wake of metagenomics and engineering, is working to build large-scale infrastructure
for synthetic biology. He tells me that several teams of scientists representing different
disciplines from around the US have been meeting with federal agencies begging to be
regulated. As of yet, there are only foot-dragging responses. It will be even slower for
intellectual property law and how value will come to be rendered. Scientists anticipate that
single gene sequences will no longer be patented as such. Rather new ownership and use
rights regimes will target built genomic systems dynamics. That is, the relationality of the
thing is what will give rise to new forms of knowledge and value, and not the thing itself.
Indeed, Choy poses questions regarding the entanglements of earth systems through
financial instruments - carbon futures, weather derivatives, etc. What further connections can
be drawn between relationality and these derivative modes of value making? Also, I wonder
how multiplicity and relationality figure in future experimental systems a la Hans Joerg
Rheinberger. Astrid Schrader’s work on experiment and indeterminancy extend Rheinberger
and perhaps pose new questions/dilemmas here. And of course corporate action and
government regulation must configure or accommodate both innovation and limits, as Choy
points out. How might we consider the ontology of data here? And does the empirical need
to account for both multiplicity and measurability in new ways? I’m especially thinking about
two sorts of knowledge that exist at once: indeterminacies in connecting toxics to health
while more “explicit?” information exists to support decision-making in thriving carbon
markets.
Related, if the ecopolitical is derived from Foucault’s biopolitics then I suspect there is
something to open up here, not just life in the realm of explicit calculation – Choy hints at
this. Perhaps Foucault’s other registers of biopolitics might be helpful here, namely how can
we grammatically and epistemologically account for life in a future oriented way? Valerie
Olson’s work (and many others) on space biomedicine comes to mind. Olson describes
NASA’s interest in testing the limits of human survival in “extreme environments” where the
concept of environment cannot be separated from biology or life processes. She marks a
shift from “life itself ” to sites of interface among living things, technologies and
environments. She describes “ecobiopolitical strategies” that create a new “space normal
physiological category, situating humans as at-risk elements within integrated biological
environmental systems.”
I think about Olson’s work alongside Choy’s mulling over of Sloterdijk and Masco’s
“embedding atmospherics in militarized and national histories of war”- work that thinks
through political and, certainly, financial futures. But within these futures something changes
in the capacity of being/becoming human, be it daily interfaces with heavy air pollution or
reorienting physiologies to accommodate outer space, or food reconfiguring physiology
itself. What kind of politics is at stake here? Like Donna Haraway who wants to make visible
the animal in a human dominated world filtering limited ecologies of being, Choy asks what
would it be like to build hopeful futures with contaminated material. Indeed, “this must be a
complex, dirty story.”
Patricia Williams puts it another way: “That life is complicated is of great analytical
importance.” Williams invites us to view all things that get missed in lines drawn between
traumatic history and the present. Avery Gordon refers to this as “ghostly matters” where
she argues that in studying social life we must confront the non-empirical, yet tangibly felt
ghostly aspects of it; it requires rethinking how we produce knowledge. In extending or
multiplying William’s notion of life, I wonder what falls between Choy’s wonderful rendering
of “substance and kinship.” While this part seems to be in an early thinking stage, he
imagines what it means to care for one’s atmosphere – both the dynamics between living
beings and the world of their interaction. The parallel he draws between “breathers” and
Marx’s “worker” is a beautifully rendered example of this kind of politics. Similar to the way
that Marx establishes a relationship between the worker and the milieu of industrial
capitalism, Choy thinks of the breather in connection to unaccounted costs in processes of
production and consumption. There is an unequal distribution of breath where some of the
living, but not all, literally inhale “externalized wastes and debts” of surplus value.
The call at the end here is for suspending ordinary experience – to “sense in a different way”
as he puts it, while drawing on Ranciere. What political and atmospheric politics might be
possible across the broad spectrum of breathers, he wonders? I wonder too, especially in a
time where public goods and the “commons” are increasingly unstable or disappearing as
both objects and shared entitlements. At the same time, they emerge in other unequal yet
shared ways, such as in breathing events. How might the proposition of “atmospheric
subjects” and the interruption of normal experience collude to open up a new kind of
politics?
Georges Canguilhem. 2008. “The Living & Its Milieu” In Knowledge of Life. Garoulanos and
Ginsburg, trans. New York, Fordham University Press: 98-120.
Tim Choy. Forthcoming. Ecologies of Comparison. Duke University Press.
Avery Gordon. 2008. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. University of
Minnesota Press
Donna Haraway. 2007. When Species Meet. University of Minnesota Press.
Hannah Landecker. 2011. “Food as exposure: Nutritional epigenetics and the new
metabolism.” Biosocieties.
Valerie Olson. 2010. “The Ecobiopolitics of Space Biomedicine.” Medical Anthropology.
29(2):170-93.
Hans-Jorg Rheinberger. 1997. Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the
Test Tube. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Astrid Schrader. 2010. "Responding to Pfiesteria piscicida: Phantomic Ontologies,
Indeterminacy, and Responsibility in Toxic Microbiology." Social Studies of Science
April 40(2)275-306.
Patricia Williams. 1992. Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor. Harvard
University Press.