Aerosolic Antagonisms
In this ongoing body of work I consider the properties of aerosols and argue they constitute a form of material assembly and socio-spatial practice with political efficacy and aesthetic import.
I combine a study of atmospheric aerosols with Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s early theorization of antagonism to propose an environmental relation between bodies, materials, and space that dissolves a normative hierarchy of difference. Such a dissolution begs a consideration of what new forms of social and political life become possible and necessary amidst an aerosolic condition.
2020 - Ongoing
Aerosols constitute an order of material composition innately threatening to both categorically and concretely delimited bodies. The threat they pose, however, is best understood as a political potential to upset the techniques with which bodies are specified and relations amongst them configured. Aerosols have an operative capacity to disturb the discursive and material grounds of social formation by refiguring the precise limits of an objective position to exceed any essential circumscription and then redistributing the contents through a conditional atmosphere. The effects of this disturbance are manifold. Body becomes an indeterminate object and momentary suspension changing in accord with the material circumstances from which it emerges. Relations between these kinds of bodies are typified by material dispersions of one figure into another and each into ground. Without a Cartesian logic defined by longitudinal vectors of connection and transverse frontiers of division graphically undergirding the coordination of discrete subject positions, isolated and complete unto themselves, a new sociality of space is produced. Careful attention must be given to how the currents of power and forms of practice develop here because it is in this sociality—where bodies are more than what they appear and not what they are—that aerosolic antagonisms take shape as an aesthetic form and process of politics.