In an effort to meaningfully post my way through my PhD, I will be sharing a series of critical response essays to this blog. The first three installments come from a directed readings organized by myself and my colleague Adriana DiSilvestro, along with Dillon Mahmoudi and Dave Lansing. We are meeting every two weeks during the Fall ’22 semester and discussing selected monographs and essays. The themes are broadly capitalism, life, and infrastructure.
I understand backing up Porkopolis with Economic Poisoning – linking these books is an understanding that liberal formulations are inadequate to understanding the industrialization of agriculture. Romero explicitly shifts focus away from the downstream effects of what he reminds us time and again is literal poisoning – there is little handwringing about the differentiated exposure to carcinogenic pesticides experienced by migrant workers, or instructions on how to wash your veggies and what not to buy in the produce section. Instead, Romero provides an industrial history of agriculture. Underlying this history, as in basically any story about capitalist industrialization, is the search for more use values and how science (broadly construed) is enrolled in that search. Romero uses the term “dissipative function” to describe the movement of arsenic waste from the production of copper commodities into other commodities – candy, paint and of course as a chemical pesticide. I love the term – it serves as a reminder that these wastes are material and literally need a place to go, to be dissipated across the landscape. Arsenic, as well as oil later in the book, need to keep moving around; not just for the accumulation of profits but also because they need somewhere to go lest they pile up and take up precious space for industrial production (or in the case of arsenic, the subsequent unruly dissipation of arsenic over neighboring forests and towns). From one angle, this search for ever more use values and dissipative functions looks like progress, and the market doing its “thing”. From another more lucid angle, it looks like thousands of mad men trying to jam a square peg into a round hole. Myriad crises unfold – from overproduction, which is familiar territory for economic geographers – to muckraking British journalists exposing arsenic’s downstream effects on the nation’s children.
The quest for dissipative functions has me thinking about tech and mobility. For example, the sense that we are having e-scooters and micromobility shoved down our throats just because the surplus of cheap batteries, cheap labor, cheap spatial data and desperate, easily bought cities are ripe conditions for cheap scooters to dissipate into.
I also was hooked by the twofold meaning of application – as in a use value, but also the physical application of these poisons to crops. The mixing of fog and cyanide in California orange groves, the literal painting of potatoes and apples with Paris Green and so on. Romero’s attention to the material qualities of oil, arsenic, cyanide etc. as well as to their physical application in the grower’s fields, I thought, was pretty excellent (and the major contribution of this work vs. the pretty dry industrial history he otherwise is laying out.
Also Romero’s geography – the birth of copper industry in Southwest England anchors the early part of the book but in no time of course the action shifts to California, where the revolving door of university scientists and industrialists roughly still anchors the American/global economy today.
Turnstile Jumper 