Anatomic
The keys touch me when I type. My breath smells because other creatures live out their ends in my mouth. Wearing a waterproof jacket perverts my immune response. My throat is sore because of a miniature life form that, when magnified, looks like a string of pearls. My neighbour’s attempt to control dandelions leads to misspellings in my adrenal gland. In my lower intestine, E. coli reproduces, making vitamin K and assisting with undigested carbohydrates. My fat collects signatures from one of the most profitable companies in the world. In necessary ways and toxic ways, the outside doctors the inside. This is evolutionary history and this is a metabolic response to the energy technologies of my historical moment. Petrochemicals brand hormonal messages that course through endocrine pathways and drive my metabolism. I wear multinational companies in my flesh. But I also wear symbiotic and parasitic relationships with countless nonhumans who insist for their own reasons on making me human. I want to know the stories of these chemicals, metals, and organisms that compose me. I am an event, a site within which the industrial powers and evolutionary pressures of my time come to write. I am a spectacular and horrifying crowd. How can I read me? How can I write me?
– Adam Dickinson: Anatomic (2018) 1
1. Modern Dichotomies, Climate Change, and Human Exceptionalism
The inheritance of modernity consists of injurious and predatory forms of interdependency sustaining human life on earth: agro-industry is depleting the soil and the so-called “lungs of the earth” are burning in California, the Amazon rainforest, and elsewhere humans—inside our bodies—are also in flames. Climate change denialism has become hegemonic across the planet, modern allopathic medicine is falling short in curing us, and public healthcare systems are increasingly defunded and becoming unreliable. This is the background for the explosion of the post-pandemic global corporate industry for mindfulness, wellness, and fitness providing solutions for individualized health problems. Fitness, mindfulness, and wellness are also linked to a search for youth and unreachable perfection that is the grounds for self-commodification. At the same time, a considerable portion of the planetary population is undergoing an epidemic of inflammatory disease and addictions triggered by the maiming of our microbiomes (or gut flora) and chronic stress.
We could argue that disease, climate change denial, and the belief in science technology to prolong youth and cure disease originated in modernity’s ideological hegemonies of race, gender, and their constitutive dichotomy: the separation of mind and body, which is extensive to the separation of humans from nature, mind from emotions, and the premise of the malleability or plasticity of nature and the human mind and body. These ideological hegemonies are imprinted on our bodies as historical modes of truth as the grounds of our apocalyptic present. Modern societies have been built by “working” nature/the body, considered as simple matter, and other living beings have been put to work according to human desires and needs. The notion of “nature” as distinct from human reason and as malleable, moreover, has enabled modern humans to occupy the earth in a way that has radically changed the planet, bringing all its living systems to the brink of collapse. The ideology of the malleability of nature and its availability for humans to be taken as a “resource” has led us to take for granted food in cities, to oversee or forget the destruction in so-called sacrifice zones necessary for city dwellers to have access to water and gas and other vital resources to sustain human lives. The global availability of all-weather foods has blinded us to the environmental costs of industrialization of food production which involves damaging and polluting processes like processing, cold storage, and transportation across the globe. We are complicit with the industrialized food system based on extractivism, which is maiming biodiversity, spreading toxicity, mass extinction, pollution, unemployment, deforestation, soil erosion, water depletion, diminishing our gut’s microbiome thus negatively impacting our immune systems, leading to obesity and chronic disease. Inflammation is the body’s appropriate response to damage or threat to damage. All the inhabitants of the planet are now vulnerable or suffer from inflammatory diseases such as cancer, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, hypertension, depression, Crohn’s disease, fibromyalgia, diabetes, autism, and food allergies and sensitivities.2 In tandem with climate change, pathologies derived from the demands of modern life, like hyper-individualism and chronic stress, due to the repression of emotions and failure to recognize that they are integral part of our health, are further fueling disease. We could understand inflammation as a “pathology of adaptation” in the sense that stress, diet, and antibiotics, which are modern industrialized lifestyle factors, have triggered changes in our gut bacteria. This, in turn, has caused modifications in our immune systems and is proof that all human and in-human systems on Earth are symbiotic: Our genes and the environment interact to produce inflammation and allergies as a way to adapt to man-made conditions to inhabit the earth.
In this context, we should consider that the gut is a crucial form of bodily intelligence: a non-consciousness related to the immune brain in charge of maintaining homeostasis, that is, the balance between the human body and its environment. Considering that the human body’s materiality is porous and made up of two thirds bacteria to one third human matter, by acknowledging the function of the gut-brain axis, and thinking that we humans are the planet’s microbiome, we could radically redefine what we believe is the “human” and consider that the microbiome in our guts, the propagation of fake news in social media, the ongoing extermination of the population in Gaza by Israel, the fragility of international finance, and massive extinction, are all interconnected. By thinking beyond the modern dichotomies and the concept of the “human,” we could only begin to understand how everything interacts through interdependent symbiotic networks, taking shape and disaggregating, based on symbiotic analogous structures. For example, the point of departure of the work of disability rights theorist Sunaura Taylor is to consider the chronically disabled environment as encompassing incapacitated human minds and bodies.3 This means that our condition is currently that of “posthumans” in the sense that forever chemicals, pesticides, antibiotics, and plastics are part of our bodies now as much as of our ecosystems. It also means that our post-political, post-human planet is inhabited by disabled, inflamed, ill, and addicted forms of life mirroring each other: an obese body is analogous to a dead river or a burnt forest.
In this context, the wellness-fitness industries can be understood as providing hyper-individualized solutions for the rich who are embracing wellness and fitness as rituals or solutions to individually adapt to our dying planet in denial of the symbiotic links between human and non-human living systems. In other words, fitness, mindfulness, and wellness are corporate industrial complexes that offer forms of adaptability to our disabled planet and dysfunctional societies in a hyper-individualist culture facing multiple crises: pandemic, climate change, massive racial and economic inequality, and the failure of the left.
For instance, one of the premises of the currently blooming wellness-fitness industry is the belief that aging is a kind of disease as opposed to a normal stage of the life cycle. As I have already mentioned, modernity considers humans apart from nature and this has meant, following Val Plumwood, a conception of death as the end of the story of the mind and body of the self. In other words, modernity granted humans the status of exception as both species and hyper-individuals, as outside of the food chain and positioned as predators, as the eaters of others but who are never themselves eaten. This results in a war of life against aging and death, trying to excessively prolong or immortalize human life by using science and technology to enhance our bodies, combat “inflammaging,” and to postpone death. Plumwood concludes that exceptionalism makes us deny that we ourselves are part of the food chain, that we actually take nurturance form others to survive, but as predators in a place of exceptionality, refuse to give back.4
This is the background for a post-COVID-19 pandemic, right-leaning search for individual perfection and strength optimization through mindfulness, wellness, and fitness in a context in which pain, trauma, and inflammatory illness, together with the drive toward self-destruction, are operating as points of separation within collectivities through self-exposure, claims of exceptionality, and the privatization of social problems.
2. From Revolution to Aerobics to Biohacking
Fitness cultures have been traditionally linked to supremacist movements defending eugenics and to Nazism, because one of its principles was to promote living healthy, eating natural foods, and building athletic bodies. Today, wellness and fitness are a tendency linked to the extreme right and to practices of self-help, guidance by life coaches, biohacking through supplements and data-trackers. In sum, it is a billion-dollar industry for the optimization of the “I” charged with the promise of healing through branding and consumption, which is only available to the wealthy. According to a recent article in The New York Times,5 health (or what it has become: spending a lot of money on feeling mentally and physically fit) has become one of the most in-demand luxury products in the city of New York. Sollis Health, a “concierge emergency care provider,” facilitates same-day appointments, on-site lab testing and virtual care for up to $6,000 a year depending on age. NutriDrip offers IV vitamin drips for revitalization, nutrition, and detoxification of “harmful toxins from urban exposure” for $355 for nonmembers. For $2,750 a month, Remedy Place, a social wellness club based in New York and Los Angeles, offers unlimited access to a “hyperbaric oxygen chamber, lymphatic compression suit, ice bath breakwork classes, cryotherapy and a red light bed.” The Wellness offers mental health tune-ups. Its memberships cost up to $495 a month to have access to mindfulness and movement classes, infrared saunas, cold plunge sessions, and on-site lounge with free bone broth and a crystal-charged meditation dome. Considering the organism as a platform to be upgraded and optimized, the Silicon Valley version of fitness implemented the use of trackers and data as forms of self-help and enhancement. The use of nootropics also became popular in the Valley: nootropics which are unregulated cognitive-enhancement drugs that claim to take consumers to the next level of thinking, to peak performance. Red light and binaural beat are also offered to optimize sleep cycles. Tracking personal metrics like heart rate variability, sleep latency, glucose levels, and ketones with digital devices, offers measurable self-betterment.6 Obviously we all want to feel better, to sleep, eat, or be better persons. The question is, what is within our reach and what is beyond our control, and how are we enmeshed in a senseless search for unreachable perfection linked to hyper-individualism and branding in social media?
The birth of our era is the dawn of the Reagan and Thatcher years, when Olivia Newton-John was number one in the charts, and spandex and legwarmers were the uniform for newly fitness obsessed women and men. Writer and activist Barbara Ehrenreich interpreted that era’s search for health and wellness as a reaction to the failure of the hopes raised by political and militant movements in the 1960s and 1970s.7 The figures of Jane Fonda and Jerry Rubin are examples of radical left activists who turned their life-projects into a search for fitness, substituting the political idealism of the previous era in favor of an obsessive pursuit of bodily perfection, giving way to a collective of atomized individuals turning their attention toward working on their bodies. Specifically, Jane Fonda embodied a feminist struggle fought by way of fitness: her recovery from an eating disorder hinged on devoting herself to physical exercise in the form of aerobics, which she then took to marketing, creating an aerobics videos emporium. Fonda’s feminist message was to be sexy and strong as a means to empower women.8 The Apple+ TV series Physical dramatizes Jane Fonda’s story through Sheila, a woman who discovers the pleasure and the potential of aerobics to achieve her own autonomy and the pressures of beauty standards in terms of thinness and fitness, which partially caused her severe eating disorder. Throughout the first season, we hear Sheila’s self-loathing inner monologue which drives her to despair and to fast-food places to buy way too much food that she takes to a cheap motel to binge and purge, which is how she gets some sense of control. After the binge and purge, Sheila affirms to herself: “Tomorrow I will eat clean, healthy food, I will find a new dance class. I will have a nice day.” In the series, however, Sheila’s path to fulfillment and healing becomes more about economic power than self-actualization: money, and the freedom it gives her, is what apparently cures her. The telling of her story is thus grounded not on her own voice but on a simplistic narrative where making money can help women recover from negative messages about our bodies and self-worth. In this sense, Jane Fonda/Sheila would come to embody the paradox of the Reagan/Thatcher neoliberal era: while pressures increased on women to adjust to certain beauty and fitness standards, fitness culture falsely advances a feminist agenda or enables healing from mental or eating disorders because it indeed objectifies women by encouraging women (and men) to see themselves as, and to become, objects of appreciation.
The movie Perfection (1985), starred by Jamie Lee Curtis and John Travolta, lays forth the background of contemporary absolute self-commodification through a perfect-branded-self. While the search for fitness today remains linked to dubious feminism and false female empowerment, it now encompasses kinds of spiritual practices like mindfulness and westernized versions of yoga; fitness has moved beyond aerobics to encompass cross-fit, an extreme, quasi-masochistic practice and practices of wellness that deal with normal aging issues like debility, microbiome imbalances, hormonal drips, decrease in mobility, loss of hair, muscle tone, and libido, but also toxic inflammation, food intolerances and sensitivities, heavy metal poisoning, over-stress, and nutrient deficits; stress, anxiety, depression, and burnout. The wellness industry promises to help through diet, fitness, resilience, IV drips, CBD, mindfulness, yoga, life-style consumption, and biohacking. Biohacking is another new practice of health and bodily optimization that uses scientific tools and shortcuts to optimize physical potential. The three main pillars of biohacking are anti-aging and the promotion of longevity, mood support through neurochemistry, and nootropics or turbo-charging memory and cognitive processes. All three areas overlap toward promoting longevity and optimizing memory and cognitive function, all to maximize happiness and wellbeing.9
The hordes of Instagram biohackers and health gurus performing idealized versions of themselves wearing spandex, nylon, polyester, and lycra, however, embody one of the ironies of our contemporary planetary post-human era grounded on modern obliviousness of the planetary systems that sustain human life on earth: Workout clothes are made with synthetic fabrics treated with chemicals such as flame retardants, blisphenols, and PFAS that can be absorbed by the skin and cause cancer. Sweat actually helps the bad chemicals to come out of the microplastic fibers and thus to be absorbed by the human body. Of all the types of plastic found in clothes, PFAS are known to be carcinogenic.10 Modernity has made us blind to the fact that bodies do not exist isolated from their environment or each other, and in this context, biohacking leading to bodies as being part of a persona’s competitive edge is the utmost expression of hedonistic individualism and climate change denial and branding. Lived today as an act of empowerment, the endless search for physical perfection is the utmost act of self-commodification.
Following Naomi Klein, we are all trapped inside social and economic structures that encourage us to obsessively perfect our selves. As a consequence, the landscape of possible change is reduced to the hyper-individualized self, while our planetary problems grow larger and larger. In her view, the projections of people’s doubles on social media are nothing other than ways of not seeing, forms of denial manifested as the appearance of selves as perfected brands, selves as digital avatars, selves as data mines, selves as idealized bodies, selves as eternal victims. These projections blind us because, she argues, we are so busy performing an idealized version of ourselves that we are not seeing the world and the connections among us.11 These social media projections of our perfected selves constitute our own denial because we obviously do not want our bodies to be part of mass extinction, we do not want to be complicit with ways in which other bodies are degraded, abused, and worked to exhaustion, we do not want the lands that we live on to be stolen and haunted.12 In this context, considering our bodies as temples, we tell ourselves that we are keeping ourselves strong, building our immune systems, that our bodies are force fields against whatever is coming. And while the body is a small terrain upon which we can feel a sense of control in the face of the accelerated environmental changes and multiple crises, transformations through fitness, wellness, and mindfulness bring us solace and healing.
These self-care trends, however, individualize the responsibility for what needs to be systemic, symbiotic change. From this point of view, wellness, mindfulness, and fitness become aspirational needs, moral obligations and, above all, sedatives to our planetary problems. While pressures and myths about fitness and wellness standards have above all fallen upon women, in the post-pandemic, this has given way to an upper class notion of pursuing a “natural life” through consumption related to bodily strength, fitness, purity, and divinity—and has also called forth its opposite: the lower-class non-natural, intoxicated, bodily and mental weakness, sloth, pollution, and damnation.13 And whenever we are working within a hierarchy of humans and bodies, Klein reminds us, we are on fascist territory: Nazis were fitness obsessives who fetishized the natural and the hyper-fit form of genes.
In addition, what we are embodying are forms of subjectivity grounded on modern humanism molded by neoliberalism: On the one hand, there is the figure of the successful, fit entrepreneur struggling toward the top of the pyramid who overcomes difficulties to excel, able to dominate her body through fitness and wellness and her mind through mindfulness. She is in fact the opposite of a subject that rebels against this neoliberal logic of self-optimization, the opposite of subjects who are unfit, inflamed, jobless, or poor and enmeshed in forms of self-destruction, thriving in the consumption of excess substances or substances in excess. Both forms of subjectivity are not always binary opposites but their enmeshment is epitomized by the “Hangover Bus” in Las Vegas: a biohack that takes up health as a personal quick fix.14 Disability, trauma, illness, and chronic stress, however, are as real as the injured environment, and have no quick fix.
3. The recalcitrant body dominated by the mind toward superhumanness
Today I would like to read marathon swimmer Diana Nyad’s discourse and feat in the light of Hungarian philosopher Agnès Heller’s definition of the essence and logics of modernity and Catherine Malabou’s notion of plasticity. Nyad’s major achievement of swimming 177 km from Cuba to Florida at the age of 64 is well beyond a politicized act and symptomatic of our contemporary world of toxicity and excess. For Heller, the essence of modernity is freedom insofar as modernity emerges in and through the destruction and deconstruction of all foundations.15 Freedom is thus the arché, commencement, or origin of modernity and translates to all modern dynamics: from social arrangements to human subjectivity, and cuts across almost all levels of the modern imagination. For Heller, in modernity, meaning is found in freedom and freedom means that every limit can and must be crossed, the only remaining limit being the death of the single “existent.” Freedom to cross limits is inextricable from the freedom to become one’s “true self” or essence by overcoming social, ethnic, or bodily constraints, especially trauma.
Diana Nyad broke records and achieved a number of firsts in marathon swimming. At the age of 60, she decided to complete a challenge that she had failed to achieve when she was 28: to swim 100 miles from Cuba to Florida without the aid of a shark cage. The Gulf of Mexico is home to dangerous marine life and the Gulf Stream makes the currents unpredictable. It took Nyad four additional attempts to finally complete the swim on September 2, 2013, after more than 53 hours in the water. When Oprah asked Nyad why she decided to pursue this feat, she quoted Thoureau on achievement: “What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals.” She also declared that:
…[doing the swim] was about who I am and what I needed at sixty: Am I living a life that I can admire? Am I going to leave the earth a place that it was a little more just, where human rights have been fulfilled and never giving up and finding a way through your obstacles and finding your grit (perseverance and passion, to work strenuously toward achieving long-term goals despite failures, adversities) and your will? Swimming has always been for me those values: and that is why I did that swim…
The most dangerous part of Nyad’s swim were the boxed jellyfish. If stung by them, she would be immediately paralyzed, including her heart and lungs. Nyad declared that the jellyfish problem was not an issue of mind over matter because she had no control over them, that part of her quest was to find solutions. She beat the jellyfish with the help of a biologist who provided her with a special suit and mask. Another thing that was beyond her control were the Gulf currents. For that, she hired a navigator who helped her to predict when it would be best to swim without getting pulled off course, or getting caught in a storm. In the Oprah interview, Nyad describes how she was able complete the impossible record-shattering journey at the age of 64: “Resolved by sheer will, compelled by the human spirit: courage.” “Triumph over the will,” “inspiring story,” “true survival,” “spirit larger than the body,” and “the relentless life force of the human will” are phrases that have been used to describe Nyad’s beyond-human achievement. The ideology of fitness is the perpetual struggle between mind and body: the body is considered to be a recalcitrant mass commanded by the mind, which in turn is considered the moral overdog that prevails and commands our malleable bodies. Nyad’s sheer will to achieve the swim is epistemologically, discursively, and logically a by-product of modern humanism: The admirable will of a woman who was free to triumph over her nature, over the sea, by pushing her body with her mental strength, and with the help of science and technology.
After Heidegger, Heller argues that one of the logics of the modern imagination is technology, which means that science is the container of the modern concepts of truth (as true knowledge), linked to the unlimited progression of knowledge in technology and science replacing religion. For Heller, moreover, the technological imagination implies a mental attitude toward problem-solving and rationality toward realizing goals. “Find solutions,” said Nyad in the Oprah interview. The technological imagination treats both nature and men as objects and it includes faith in progress and in the accumulation of knowledge.
From this perspective, Diane Nyad’s accomplishment embodies the true essence of modernity: it originates in its own freedom to break through all limits by dominating the body and nature through the mind and technology. The meaning of the feat is related to the ideal model of social arrangements, a hierarchy constituted by allocating positions to men and women “according to their merit or excellence.” Her achievement made her become something beyond herself: a celebrity, a story of success. The technological and the historical imagination, in other words, have given way to narratives around what it means to be human, a belief system or cosmology that self-replicates and that we take as universal and natural truths on a teleological road toward a superior stage of humanness in the guise of success and celebrity status.
Nyad’s discourse encompasses the modern assumption that both the body and nature are malleable, and this assumption, as Heather Davis argues, is emblematic of the material relations of modernity. In modernity matter has no agency, no animacy, but it has the quality of plasticity. Davis writes: “If the mind is separate from the body, matter and bodies are free for experimentation, for exploration and exploitation in their plastic mode. The Cartesian Revolution privileged the ontology of entities or substances over relationships and favored the idea of a purposive control over nature through applied science.”16 Davis links the philosophical concept of plasticity to the creation of plastic, which she reads as “a materialization of the ideal of Form.”17 Following Catherin Malabou, Davis argues that the imposition of a mold is not limited to matter but extends to people. Here we must draw a distinction between plasticity versus elasticity: elasticity returns to an original form, whereas plasticity is what results from a traumatic (explosive, pathological, destructive) break. For Catherine Malabou, plasticity is the term Hegel uses for the conditions and operation by which consciousness can be radicalized from within its systemic confines. Plasticity is the “motor-scheme” of the movement of thought. Plasticity is a figuration of time in the sense that the idea seizes, molds, and shapes the future; plasticity is the future. Plasticity and trauma are behind Nyad’s accomplishment.
Throughout the swim (in its five iterations), the environment and the body were vigorously saying NO to her: the jellyfish, the currents, the salt seeping into her body making her hallucinate and vomit. The wounds, her exhaustion. The plasticity of substance (soul, mind), her grit, her strive toward transcendence and the sublime, transformed her body into a machine leading her to accomplish the feat. “True surviving,” someone described it. In the Oprah interview and the Netflix movie we learn that Nyad was abused by her swimming coach throughout her teens. A sequel of child abuse is dissociation, a psychological phenomenon wherein individuals detach from immediate reality as a way to cope with the abuse. In the context of Nyad’s accomplishment, “sheer will” actually means dissociation and repetition of the bodily trauma-response to abuse, a situation when the body is actually saying no through reactions like vomiting, spasms, and dissociation.
Nyad’s achievement is therefore a true symptom of our late modernist era, as she succeeded in transforming her traumatic experience into capital, achieving the status of “super-human.”
4. Conclusion: Healing
According to Canadian physician Gabor Maté, women who have been physically or psychologically abused, or whose partners are emotionally distant and unavailable, but who also lack of psychological independence, feel the overwhelming need for love and affection and the inability to feel or express anger have long been identified by medical observers as permanent stressors and possible factors in the natural development of an array of inflammatory diseases. To heavy metal poisoning, microplastics, and maimed microbiomes, we can add living with acute chronic stress. According to Maté, ours is a stress-driven society and our bodies are waging a civil war inside because modernity has made us understand our physical pathologies through another dichotomy: the separation of emotions from the mind. Psychoneuroimmunology is the science of interactions of the indissoluble unity of emotions and physiology in human development, premised on the fact that the mind and its content—emotions—interact profoundly with the body’s nervous system, and both form an essential link with our immune defenses. The relationships between stress, impaired immunity, and inflammatory illness have led to the creation of the concept of “pathologies of adaptation,” originating in part in our failure to acknowledge that our emotional environment and our physiology are crucial to our well-being. In their book Inflammed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice, US based Hindu doctors Rupa Marya and Raj Patel argue that in our contemporary world something, or a lot, needs fixing. They would agree with wellness gurus who say that we live in a culture that makes people ill. But instead of presenting us with individual expensive solutions, Marya and Patel advocate for what they call “deep medicine,” which implies systemic changes that would detoxify our world and enable us to make healthy choices affordable for everyone.
It is becoming clearer and clearer that contrary to what modern humans believe in, we are not protected by a shell of technology independent from the environment we inhabit. Our links to the world and other living beings are real, complex, and our bodies are permeable and mirror the outside world because we exist in symbiosis with the environment. Clearly, there is something that needs healing and acknowledging: On the one hand, modern culture is built upon a denial of death and obliviousness of the collateral damage of modernized life-styles. If we examine where food really comes from, we get a mirror of our own modern beings as predators ravaging the planet. On the other hand, modern technologies are at the center of a project of “worldmaking” or “terraforming” (bioengineering, accelerationism, biohacking) linked to self-destructive dependency on fossil fuels, predation to subsist, and the extractivist-colonial technosphere to sustain human life on earth. This has given way to necropower, a globalized apparatus that produces ill, diseased, and disabled bodies through the pharmaco-alimentary industrial complex, also polluting the planet. Without a doubt, we need structural changes to learn to compost death, as Val Plumwood has put it,18 as well as to detoxify the world and our bodies, and collectively find strategies to learn to live with the toxicity. Or, as Sunaura Taylor puts it, to enable collective planetary discapacity to flourish. Then, in order to ensure the long-term survival of humans on Earth, we need a cognitive emancipation from the modern subjective, aesthetic, social, and political fields. Following Dipesh Chakrabarty, we have entered “the advent of the planetary,” which means decentering the human and acknowledging the planet beyond politics, because global politics does not provide tools and resources to deal with planetary problems. In his view, to stay, to engage with the problem, is to recognize that our crises are post-political because no one speaks politically for the planet. It also means to acknowledge habitability as a central collective problem for the future,19 considering the body as a product of the symbiosis between humans and that all the planet’s systems and that everything and everyone are off sync and intoxicated. Will we be able to create reciprocal networks for the sustenance of life to regenerate, reproduce, repair, and rebalance human and non-human symbiotic life systems on earth?
NOTES
1 Adam Dickinson, Atomic (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2018), p. 9.
2 The ways in which we grow and prepare our food and manmade chemicals have altered our microbiome and thus creating allergies, making our immune systems more irritable, as allergies expand worldwide. Theresa Macphail considers food allergies as a phenomenon part of a generational change that signals the problem of how modern industrialized lifestyle factors (like diet or the consumption of antibiotics) have triggered changes in commensal bacteria causing inflammatory disease, changing our microbiota. As a consequence, our immune systems are changing, becoming prone to allergies, and this is proof of how all human and in-human systems on Earth are symbiotic: our genes and the environment interact to produce allergies. See: Theresa Macphail, “How Modernity Made Us Allergic,” Noema Magazine (August 8, 2023), available online: https://www.noemamag.com/modernity-has-made-us-allergic/
3 Sunaura Taylor, Lecture at UC Berkeley on March 5, 2019, available online: https://belonging.berkeley.edu/video-sunaura-taylor-disabled-ecologies-living-impaired-landscapes and her forthcoming book Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2024).
4 Val Plumwood, “Tasteless: Towards a Food-Based Approach to Death,” Environmental Values, Vol. 17, No. 3 (August 2008), pp. 323–330.
5 Eliza Shapiro, “Behind the Gates of a Private World for Only the Wealthiest New Yorkers,” The New York Times, November 6, 2023, available online: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/06/nyregion/nyc-rich-private-clubs.html
6 Anna Wiener, Uncanny Valley: A Memoir (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux 2020).
7 Barbara Ehrenreich, Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer (New York: Twelve, 2018).
8 Barbara Ehrenreich, Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer (New York: Twelve, 2018).
9 Lee on Biohacking.
10 Adrienne Matei, “Thread carefully: your gym clothes could be leaching toxic chemicals,” The Guardian, November 2, 2023, available online: https://www.theguardian.com/wellness/2023/nov/02/workout-clothes-sweat-chemicals-cancer
11 Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2023).
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid.
14 Lina Golgowski, “The Las Bus that Cures Hangovers,” April 9, 2012, available online: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2127127/The-Las-Vegas-bus-cures-hangovers-just-45-minutes--provided-youre-afraid-IVs.html
15 Agnes Heller, “The Three Logics of Modernity and the Double Bind of the Modern Imagination” Public Lecture Series (Collegium Budapest) No. 23, 2000, Budapest.
16 Heather Davis, Plastic Matter (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2022.) p. 25
17 Ibid.
18 Val Plumwood, “Tasteless: Towards a Food-Based Approach to Death,” Environmental Values, Vol. 17, No. 3 (August 2008), pp. 323–330; see also Jennifer Hamilton and Astrida Neimanis, “Composting Feminism and Environmental Humanities,” Environmental Humanities, Vol. 10, No. 2 (2018) pp. 501–527.
19 Claire Webb, interview with Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Planet is a Political Oprhan” Noema Magazine (February 3, 2022) https://www.noemamag.com/the-planet-is-a-political-orphan/
Video credit: Sebastián Hinojosa
