Pollutions

The Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse, from the manuscript Apocalypse, Salisbury 1240–50 BnF, Francais 403, fol. 9r.

This essay is part of an e-flux Notes series called The Contemporary Clinic, where psychoanalysts from around the world are asked to comment on the kinds of symptoms and therapeutic challenges that present themselves in their practices. What are the pathologies of today’s clinic? How are these intertwined with politics, economy, and culture? And how is psychoanalysis reacting to the new circumstances?

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In Alex Ross’s essay “What is Noise?” he notes that Covid showed us the sonic havoc we wreak as a species. Driven indoors, machines and cars brought to a halt, birdcalls regained qualities that were only recorded decades ago: singing in lower frequencies, with richer and more complex sounds, or singing more softly. It turns out the birds had been doing something equivalent to screaming and found respite as a species in our relative silence.

All life creates waste. We tend to think of the objects of pollution in terms of what we create that pollutes, from carbon emissions, to plastic, and other toxic substances—and what we are polluting—the earth, the air, the seas. The peculiar idea of noise pollution brings us closer to pollution itself, not as a particular substance that humans have made from other natural elements, but as something emitted by human bodies that changes our relationship to the natural world. We forget that breathing is both silence and making sounds, and the sounds we make are noise pollution.

Just as we make noise, from these noises grow moral orders that disorder the earth; this is the beginning of language leaving its marks. How is it that humans have created a culture that must, if we follow Naomi Klein, “change everything” about itself if it is to effectively confront climate change? How do ideas, symbols, images, words, gestures, and habits spread and contaminate?

Michel Serres, in his book Malfeasance: Appropriation Through Pollution, points out that animals and humans both create hard and soft pollution. A wolf’s territorial marking with urine—or a nightingale’s song to delimit its territory—is no different from human pollution. Hard pollutions are “solid residues, liquids, gases,” while soft pollutions are noise, writing, signs, and images; both types of pollution flood space. “Even though different in terms of energy, garbage and marks nevertheless result from the same soiling gesture, from the same intention to appropriate, and are of animal origin.”1

Human pollution goes beyond a general fact of life’s production of waste because the desire to appropriate attempts to surpass even one’s lifetime. Soft pollution, as symbolic pollution, intoxicates. “Possessed, I myself become a waste of my own consciousness,” writes Serres in a sentence that could be about iPhones.2 Is soft pollution the same as the animal’s need to mark or define territory? Does this make us more animal or less?

The ancient Greeks were concerned with human pollution. Pollution, or miasma, are acts of moral defilement that contaminate what should be sacred. A gateway to epidemics, miasma angered the Gods and could lead to an infection of the city. Acts of incest or parenticide were major offenses—violations of sacred human bonds. We often forget that Oedipus saved a corrupt Thebes from a plague that granted him his mother’s hand in marriage. He then becomes a plague, necessitating his removal from the city he won dominion of.

The Gods protect the social fabric from human pollution. Miasma required catharsis or rituals of purification and cleansing. Purification for the ancient Greeks was moral rectification. This idea is a far cry from the paradox of our contemporary world whose sterile hatred of dirt nevertheless allows us to pollute at will. Obsessive cleanliness is a fastidiousness that loves order in an ethos that amounts to “out of sight, out of mind.” Lacan once joked that Rome (Greece’s mimetic successor) was bound to be a great fallen empire because it invented sewer systems.

I want to make a pollution joke here about exhaust and exhaust, but this is simply an equivalence in the word’s meaning which comes from “to draw off” or drain. Deleuze in his essay The Exhausted reminds us that “you were tired by something, but exhausted by nothing.”3 Human pollution is part of the exhausting that we do of ourselves that contributes to the exhaustion of the material world. “The two exhaustions, logical and psychological, ‘the head and lungs,’” as Kafka said, “arrange a rendez-vous behind our back.”4

Breathing itself is involved in waste products. “Every breath we exhale carries off a certain amount of animal heat, carbonic acid, vapor, and traces of other substances. Every adult requires daily about 360 cubic feet of pure fresh air … The 2000 gallons of air required daily weigh 25 pounds,” writes Sophia A. Ciccolina in her 1888 book, Deep Breathing: As a Means of Promoting the Art of Song, and Curing Weaknesses, and Affections of the Throat and Lungs, Especially Consumption.5 Ventilation of the body is created through deep breathing and is akin to the ventilation of a room which means removing the products of expiration, impurities in the air, the “effluvia from the sick-room” and the vapors from the kitchen. A child learns more, she says, in one hour of pure air than six hours in bad air. But if breathing is part of the process of creating waste, how can it be a solution to the waste that we create?

British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips says “giving up as a prelude, a precondition for something else to happen, a form of anticipation, a kind of courage, is a sign of the death of a desire; and by the same token it can make room for other desires. Giving up, in other words, is an attempt to make a different future.”6 This kind of giving up is a widening of attention according to Phillips, one that is less acquisitive and allows you to finally forget yourself.

Phillips couldn’t be more on the side of Eastern breath practices with these words. Breathwork plays with limits, ones that are real, like the limit of oxygen intake or the ability to retain carbon dioxide. While everyone is compulsively holding their breath, breath practices show you the room for maneuvering that you’ve lost sight of. Ancient forms of breathwork curb this gripping of the mind—to narratives, substances, itself.

Is it any wonder that everything today is being described as toxic, especially sex, words, and air? There is a quality of immensity, immersion, and yet absence, in sexuality, language, and atmosphere. Hegel thought air was deceiving to human senses: “Air is already the negativity of particularity, although this is not apparent because it is still posited in the shape of undifferentiated sameness.”7 I think the openness of these immersive particulars, to use Hegel’s language, leaves them vulnerable to toxicity; we fail to distinguish differences. This understanding might ameliorate whatever is toxifying. Oxygen, in any case, was pollution until a life-form grabbed onto it, causing the decimation of billions of other forms of life.

On a recent trip I took home to Miami Beach, all space was polluted with electronic music. It was piped into every elevator, hallway, bathroom, boardwalk, and even the beach. When I managed to find a public bench away from these speakers, I still heard the din of music from some nearby restaurant or hotel pool. After some time, I barely wanted to try and speak. What are we drowning out beyond birdsong?

I felt suddenly like the clichéd elderly person shouting, “I can’t hear myself think!” Mind you, I repeat the phrase sympathetically. Who wants to hear themselves think? In my twenty years of clinical practice, thinking has never existed at such high volume, mirroring this relentless environment, exhausting and distracting our attention. At times I thought I joined the sentiments of my adolescent patients—FML, as they say, or rather text.

The philosopher Ben Ware, who works on extinction, cautions us around this idea of “being fucked” because it is an eroticization of a dire situation that still seeks to appeal to some Other to fix things who doesn’t exist. He names this eco-masochism. We need a redirection of libidinal energy. We could look closely at an unconscious terrain to show us where we are trapped. It may, he says, come down to a few words that exert a hold on us.

“I’m not good at email anymore,” read a headline that passed through my social media from who-knows-where. I laughed. I’m not good at it anymore either. It’s all spam—meaning doing something repeatedly to disturb. The maverick psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan had a bit about this “not stopping.” What we cannot stop, he said, takes place at the point of something impossible for humans that they are having trouble avowing. What cannot be said completely or what can’t appear easily leads to compulsions facing this unthinkable limit.

How compulsive we have become! For Lacan, what is ultimately impossible is the reality of death, sexuality, and madness. At the place of these holes in the fabric of existence we cannot stop marking, producing, writing, talking, explaining, enjoying, anguishing, outraging, spamming, googling, and laying waste. My friend Elissa Marder, following Freud, notes that what we can’t stop not acknowledging is that life is intolerable and will only become more so à la climate catastrophe. We keep treating life as a source of endless enjoyment and act bewildered and outraged by a younger generation that refutes this claim.

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When I think about pollution, I land on a final frontier, one seemingly composed of two divided shores. The first is nature. Breathing and polluted atmospheres cannot escape a deep question about our relation to the natural world, the threat of extinction, our interdependence on plants and other forms of life. The second is the relationship between breathing and speaking, which is a much broader question of human culture and civilization. Come to think of it, maybe these aren’t even two shores but rather two embattled and intertwined forces? The problem is that this idea of crosscurrents is still an anthropomorphic way of perceiving matters.

We don’t understand nature’s indifference—nature which precedes us by millions of years, and certainly will outlive us, irrespective of our concern or lack of concern for her. Massive extinction because of humans is not even the first or second mass extinction on earth. Some days I want to trump up the power of nature over and above humans. On others, I want to emphasize her fragility and our monstrous power. Which strategy will call us humans to order? Here, we are square in the human problem of language and representation, as if some representation could set things right when it is also what disturbs us. Having to represent that which simply is, for some supposed purpose, is already, well, unnatural. What has nature ever had to justify or call to order?

“Why do human beings in many different cultures and epochs, pervasively and persistently, look to nature as a source of norms for human conduct? Why should nature be made to serve as a gigantic echo chamber for the moral orders that humans make?” asks Lorraine Daston in Against Nature.8 Nature has been used to justify all manner of moral worldviews, from emancipatory values to those that enslave, from religious orders that mirror nature to forms of secular theology that celebrate the natural world. There is no end of taking something that simply is—nature—and ascribing a series of “oughts” that run the gamut from killing and destroying in the image of nature’s cruelty to some supposed image of harmony and balance that is said to exist among the heterogenous forces within nature. Something is wrong.

Lacan pointed out that we have long attempted to find something right and true in the heart of humans. This has often led us to investigate our relationship to pleasure. The pleasure principle, as Freud called it, requires a homeostatic principle close to the image of a self-regulating mother earth. But we have never located any such principle, Lacan retorts—not in nature or human nature.

Whether it be the experiments in indulgence by the ancient Greeks, the swing towards stoicism that came on the heels of hedonism, or any of the religious experiments with karma, sin, atonement, or punishment for transgressing natural or divine laws—no natural equilibrium could be found. Freud invented the death drive to account for this dehiscence. Daston notes that nature takes on several death-driven forms in our conception of it and she divides these into specific natures, local natures, and universal natural laws which are meant to contain an element of deadly chaos.

Specific natures look at the forms of nature: from the growth of plant seeds or fungi to the consistency of fossil fuels, copper, or other mineral deposits, to the movements of elephant herds or bird migration. We create taxonomies based on how something behaves, is made up, or looks. These are seen as orders which are predictable, logical, and relatively solid, where problematic fluctuations or differences quickly become dramatic plots.

The moral disruption of specific nature is transgression: like sex that isn’t for reproductive purposes, the mixing of things that ought not mix. The monster appears as what breaks with a cosmic order and throws everything out of balance. The monster transgresses some natural law in the form of recognizable prohibited misbehavior or an unrecognizable new monstrosity.

Local nature, on the other hand, is about place, specific environments and ecologies, the interaction and customs that develop. “Its locus classicus was the ancient Greek Hippocratic text, Airs Waters Places (5th c. BCE), in which itinerant physicians were advised on how to treat the inhabitants of various topographies and climates.”9 These places are seen to maintain a certain equilibrium with boundaries and systems that are unique. Rather than one large totality named nature, nature is composed of many totalities like nation-states or languages.

It is not the monster who throws local nature out of a balance but in fact minor disequilibria that fail to be corrected. These are seen as a faulty mechanism that upsets a delicate balance, even or especially when that mechanism is a result of human hands. For Daston, this opens a moral model of revenge, court room sagas of crime and punishment—procedurals. It is as if local natures became angry for having their orders disturbed. Much of this undergirds the way we engage with the debate about climate change, which is often seen as nature’s punishment or revenge against a scene of human crime that needs to be made to know its guilty hand. Is it?

Elissa Marder, in a stark and stunning essay, The Shadow of the Eco, writes about the entrenched nature of human denial that makes reckoning with climate change so aporetic. Having a rational relation to destruction is impossible. Thus, every anxious and seemingly rational effort of personal responsibility risks propping up denial more insidiously as a means of assuaging anxiety and feelings of helplessness. Even the idea of reaching for zero human emissions seems denial-fueled, as if we could erase everything we’ve done in the past, and everything we will need to do in the future. We want to calculate zero?

The idea of ecocide points to life as a human crime scene against nature that is tantamount to suicide. “Ecocide is always also egocide.”10 Marder, pushing further, wants us to see that even ecocide misses something essential. “‘Climate change’ is a pleonasm because climate is change,” Elissa writes.11 “The problem now for humans is that the acceleration of that change has undermined the fundamental possibility of establishing a relation to the external world as that world has become too unstable.”12 She reminds us that Freud, in his essay on “Thoughts for the Time on War and Death,” notes that tolerating life without illusion is not possible, and we can only do our duty by giving up the illusion that life is tolerable.

Perhaps we can only reach an equanimity with nature such that we contemplate the end of the world without distress because it has no meaning to our current emotional life, and nature, being external (i.e., so far beyond our control), is finally seen for its indifference to us. If reaching this indifference is facing up to reality, this seems even less possible in a world in which we must reckon with our guilt for climate change and the problem of human indifference. What is going to set this right? It’s certainly not going to be a Swedish virgin child “speaking truth to power,” sneers Marder, about the denial-fueled hopes that have been placed on Greta Thunberg’s shoulders.

Returning to Daston, universal natural laws concern an inviolable and deterministic order. The most important model is celestial mechanics and the laws of physics, like Newton’s discovery of gravity. Some conceptions of natural laws allowed for irregularity and exceptions, while others did not. Universal natural laws were extended to the idea of divine creation, where everything, even the irregularities, were foreseen by divine vision. God might overrule his engine by miracle or punishment, but the reach of his rule is uniform and total.

“Like the orders of specific and local natures, the order of universal natural laws is still present in today’s moral orders, for example the campaign for universal human rights that know no national borders or local jurisdictions.”13 The loophole in this order is disorder by will—either as divine miracle or an act of true human freedom. This violation then can either be sanctioned or unsanctioned, but either way is an aberration of nature or a disruption of destiny.

We have three orders of nature and three unnatural figures that represent chaos and death: monsters, disequilibria, and the indeterminism of the will. Each of these correspond to three emotions, according to Daston, that speak to the human peering into a world of chaos and unpredictability. She names these horror, terror, and wonder.

Of all the nightmares, chaos is the most disturbing to humans; even breaking this disturbance into three passionate emotions in the face of disorder is a relief. We must remember that “human history is stained with orders that have been bloody, tyrannical, and ruthless, orders that suffocate like an iron vise … But the horrors of excessive order pale beside those aroused by no order at all.”14 All the “oughts” and “shoulds” projected onto nature follow from this disturbance. But why drag nature into all of this?

Shouldn’t human practices have human justifications? Shouldn’t we stop pretending that what we do has anything to do with the natural world, so that we must take sole responsibility for it and for our passions and terrors? Isn’t our human will to represent everything part of this gratuitous analogizing? Analogy is how the linguistic system keeps itself intact as an ordered whole, like a cloth whose patchwork was made and remade from itself.

Language recycles basic forms which easily allow for the creation of neologisms and other new elements in language, especially when the rules of grammar are loose. Nature’s bounty of forms is rich, as rich as language, but seems to be made less so under our moral orders in the same way that morality can flatten what we do with language. What concerns me here is our human proclivity to represent, symbolize, mythologize, which invariably gets mixed up with nature, but serves to distance us from it. At a moment when reinvention would require greater closeness to the material world, the question of how resounds.

Daston is skeptical of forbidding this projection of the human onto the natural world. We’ve lived through moments that attempted to prohibit anthropomorphism, to no avail. The mixing of natural and human orders, like justice and the rising of the sun, is not any less violent than those which try to draw a distinction between them, whichever way the valorization runs. Saying something is natural is quite weak given that nature has been used to justify all manner of contradictory moral orders. Saying something is natural cannot be inherently conservative given this level of promiscuity.

Human reason is made in human bodies. But yearning for a more perfect or ideal order is also part of being human. Metaphysics haunts all epistemology. We constantly encounter “metaphors of idolatry and dreams of angelic and divine intelligences more perfect than our own, with different bodies and senses or no bodies or senses … feeding desires that can never be realized, for a form of reason that escapes the limitations of our species.”15

Isn’t this the reason Freud was so suspicious of the “oceanic feeling” as an infantile, boundless narcissism, projected onto the entire ocean or world? Isn’t this why he thought the feeling covered over a sense for the unconscious and everything that cannot be known? Importantly, for Freud, and many psychoanalysts, nature also cannot be known, and our attempts to know it, or use it, or even pollute it, are a wish to tame this Otherness.

Of all the emotions spurned by nature, I suppose I’m the most interested in wonder. Wonder is what interrupts universal natural laws, the deterministic universe, the indifference of nature or God, or our reasons. Wonder is about chance events, miracles, and surprising and unpredictable acts. It’s the feeling I’m looking for with patients. What might just disrupt their defensive ordering?

Wonder is not about our capacity for representation or symbolic orders, which are more on the side of, well, order. Wonder is about what disorders this gratuitous human tendency towards order. We are looking for what breaks the chain of reasoning, or some supposed temporal order, and our human proclivity towards narrative. Psychoanalytic theorist Adrian Johnston calls for a weak conception of nature—not nature as causal determination, but nature as full of cracks, misfirings, failures, and random mutations. Frankenstein-like, monstrous, and disruptive, nature is processes barely fitting together. A lot like us.

For Daston, the full diversity of nature can only be seen when we are closest to its chaos, when we transcend the narrowness of our moral view of nature and our habitual ways of viewing the world. I can’t help but think here of the basic psychoanalytic principle of inducing regression in patients as a controlled descent towards this place—name it what you will: chaos, nature, the unconscious, the Real, the navel of representations reaching down into a further unknown. As Freud put it once, “With neurotics it is as though we were in a prehistoric landscape—for instance, in the Jurassic. The great saurians are still running about; the horsetails grow as high as palms.”16

How might we work better with this human refusal of limitation—a specific human will to project itself forever outwards? How can we jam the machine that wants to determine and control a final image of life? I want to turn to breathing. Breathing is a weak natural link in our bodily order. It is a crucial part of evolution towards some of the most gratuitous and disruptive human acts—for example, speaking. We don’t know where this speaking will go, what it will create, or what it will destroy. This is why “say anything” is the opening act of every psychoanalysis.

Language is as monstrous as chaotic nature, an assemblage of reversals of meaning and mutations of sound. Always in danger of being overwhelmed by nonsense or emotions. The way language mixes the functions of throat, larynx, palate, tongue, teeth, diaphragm, and nasal system is an unruly bodily montage. As the poet Paul Celan said of poetry (and of art in general), it is the path towards something truly Other—an atemwende, or “breath-turning.”

Isn’t “fuck my life” then an attempt to give up—give up projecting, give up ordering? To try to jump ahead of this problem of control over and against our world? I feel caught in the traumatic time stamp of this apocalyptic age of catastrophe. This might be the moment to find other narratives of responsibility and action. Could we bring to breath and language a richer panoply like and unlike nature’s wild diversity and weak metaphysics? Wild and weak breath-turning. All of this raises the question of who I am to say what is natural, or needed, here, with my soft pollution that is writing.

On Breathing: Care in a Time of Catastrophe is out this month from Catapult Press. A companion essay, “Silences,” will appear next week.