<b>Breathing Late Industrialism</b>

Abstract

Breakdown, trespass, seepage, degradation: this is late industrialism. Over the past decade, the term has become synonymous with collapse, describing everything from crumbling infrastructure to outmoded paradigms. But the “late” in “late industrial” carries radical potential, too. It points toward the possibility of another world taking shape within the wreckage as people retrofit broken systems, build flexible coalitions, and work creatively with time. In this collection, we train our eyes on these refashionings, asking how late industrial systems might be put to life-affirming work. Specifically, we track cases where breath, air, and atmosphere help inaugurate a “phase shift” (Choy and Zee 2015) from breakdown toward worlds otherwise. Breath has sentinel qualities: it can warn of trouble in the air. But it is also an animating force. Taking conceptual cues from this duality, contributors attend to late industrialism as it is sensed and transformed into something vital.

Particulate Matters: Trump EPA Deregulatory Science, Fossil Fuels, and Racist Regimes of Breathing

“…This is why it is so important to recognise how the Trump EPA used particulate matter as a lever across its deregulatory efforts: particulate matter is central to the wider problematic of breathing . Life today is “marked by an asthmatic quality that is both figurative and literal” such that “breath, air, and atmosphere serve as concrete problems and as concept guides” (Ahmann and Kenner 2020:418). A broad intellectual interest in breath and air is evident in several recent special issues: “Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Breath, Body, and World” in Body and Society (Oxley and Russell 2020); “Just Air?” forthcoming in Environment and Planning C ; and “Breathing Late Industrialism” in Engaging Science, Technology, and Society (Ahmann and Kenner 2020).…”

“…A broad intellectual interest in breath and air is evident in several recent special issues: "Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Breath, Body, and World" in Body and Society (Oxley and Russell 2020); "Just Air?" forthcoming in Environment and Planning C; and "Breathing Late Industrialism" in Engaging Science, Technology, and Society (Ahmann and Kenner 2020). Much of this recent attention to breath and air is specifically in relation to racism.…”

“…Life today is “marked by an asthmatic quality that is both figurative and literal” such that “breath, air, and atmosphere serve as concrete problems and as concept guides” (Ahmann and Kenner 2020:418). A broad intellectual interest in breath and air is evident in several recent special issues: “Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Breath, Body, and World” in Body and Society (Oxley and Russell 2020); “Just Air?” forthcoming in Environment and Planning C ; and “Breathing Late Industrialism” in Engaging Science, Technology, and Society (Ahmann and Kenner 2020). Much of this recent attention to breath and air is specifically in relation to racism.…”

“…All this then coincided with the eruption of Black Lives Matter protests just a month later. While “I can’t breathe” as the movement’s rallying cry specifically refers to deadly police violence, its power is that it connects multiple forms of racialised harm; as others have stressed, racism suffocates both literally and metaphorically, and air pollution—indeed, particulate matter specifically—is one of the interconnected causes of racialised suffocation (Ahmann and Kenner 2020; Apata 2020; Choy 2020; Dillon and Sze 2016; Liebman et al. 2020).…”

Knowledge infrastructure and research agendas for quotidian Anthropocenes: Critical localism with planetary scope

“… 4 This cross-scale and system analytic framework to draw out anthropocenics in diverse local contexts extends from arguments about the character (and cross-scale, cross-systems dynamics) of “late industrialism” what industrialism has become as it has cohered, aged, ossified, degraded and retrenched over time (Ahmann and Kenner, 2020; Fortun, 2012, 2014). This cross-scale, cross-system approach can be adapted and elaborated to draw out many different phenomena energy transition or environmental data capacity, for example with many constitutive elements and dynamics, drawing out cross scale and system interactions, the contradictions produced by these interactions, and resulting intensification. …”