In a Tortoiseshell: In his paper for Anthropologies of Climate and Change, Liam Seeley argues that we can rethink our relationship to our changing climate by focusing on how it interacts with our lungs. Climate is not fully external to us, as air enters our bodies with each breath we take. Liam treats the lungs as a metaphor for the functioning of climate on a larger scale; the lungs offer a microcosm of the social and political facets of climate change. His essay has a particularly powerful narrative, driven by stories about how the lungs live inâand are damaged byâthe world. Liamâs treatment of narrative is essential to his motive, thesis, and scholarly conversation.
Excerpt / Liam Seeley
I think often of the man who, while eating, accidentally inhaled a pea, which subsequently sprouted and grew into a plant inside of his lung.1 Some legumbrious diagnosis. An unexpected vegetable garden. What is sensational about the insidious pulmonary pea is that it disrespects the commonly held conception of the lungs as an âinside-spaceâ of the human body. The lungs, as an interiority, are only meant for inhabitation by non-solids, for âairâ that the body must invite inâa fact we are made intimately aware of through the often self-inflicted violence of when things âgo down the wrong pipe.â Yet, the lungs donât simply commune with the material âoutside,â whose entry upon inhalation violates the supposed âinterior.â The peaâs transgression is important for us because it makes visible the otherwise quotidian processes of incomplete containment, of both the constant spilling-into and out-of that the lungs are always performing. It is this dialectic that I am interested in. The lungs are not only an inside-space, but they also spatially implicate an âexteriorityâ through their incessant relationship of mutual touching of those particles that so enwrap and emplace the body. They are the site where the body and the world can be turned inside-out and outside-in. This dialectical spatiality of the lungs, contained in the mimetic approaches and mutual grazes of inside/outside, is always resisting stillness and enclosure. It is through this initial pulmonary understanding that we might approach the problematic of living âwithinâ and âwithoutâ a climatically changing âworld,â particularly when the paradigm of inside and outside is no longer functional.
Climate itself is no longer usefully conceptualized as the broadly planetary biosphere, as it lacks in politically identifiable and clear spatiality. As such, our reckoning with the processes driving âclimate changeâ must occur elsewhere. Iâd suggest that this âelsewhereâ is, in fact, the lungs. The lungs are not the site where climate is sensed or otherwise apprehended, as might be traditionally understoodâ rather, I argue that the lungs are spatially and temporally climate itself. Lungs, while they certainly have a morphological existence within the body as the âbreathing organ,â ultimately produce, hold, and are the space through which all air moves. They are, at least while alive and breathing, emplaced within each human body, invisible to external gazes of mastery, belonging only to their respective diaphragm. At the same time that they resist âoutsidenessâ in their pertinent interiority, they are subsuming the âoutside,â touching it constantly, exchanging whatever âairâ is nearby in that particular moment, and responding reciprocally with their own byproducts, their own thoughts, their own potentially quickened anxieties or hopes. Lungs sigh, they cough, tighten, sing, grow cancer, or peas, give speeches and chants, they insist and impatiently wait. Lungs allow the breath to âbreathe itself.â2
If we are ultimately concerned with âchangingâ (toxic, burning, and withholdings-of) air, and with its variegated affects on different bodies, we must have a collectively shared space from which networks of solidarityâand the subsequent apprehension of the collective bodyâcan emerge. Following Tim Choyâs conception of airâs subjects as âbreathersâ (âand who is not a breather?â, he asks (Choy 146)), Iâd identify this collective space of potential solidarity as the lungs. Reclaiming âclimateâ from its original military-imperial intelligibility (Masco 2010), we will trace the lungs as the space of climate, radically pulling climate down from its diffuse planetary air in order to embody and breathe the contours of its volatile contents. I propose âpulmonary climateâ as a crucial political change-of-scale that helps us to avoid the imprecision of a generalized and unspecific âbodyâ that experiences climate change, pointing instead to the specific apparatus that enables both the breath and its apprehension. While the term âbodyâ generally implies a holistic sensorium capable of various attunements to its âoutsideâ climate in which it lives, a pulmonary or âlung-ifiedâ climate brings us away from hegemonic, gazing modes of vision, smell, or touch, and instead emphasizes the already in-corporated spatiality of air that we carry with us, produce, and know, productively deemphasizing the âwholenessâ of the body in space. It is my hope that this sort of analytical, morphological dissection is productive at identifying what is materially at stake in geographically specific, âchangingâ airs.
Before moving on, Iâd like to acknowledge that appealing to the lung as a collective space of solidarity perhaps dangerously teeters at the edge of an un-useful (anatomical) humanism that smooths over drastically varied social topographies and different airs. Iâd argue, though, that a pulmonary climate doesnât neglect these relations. Choy again helpfully reminds us that these spaces of difference are ever- crucial in the act of breathing: âgradients […] move air through the spaces we live in and through our bodiesâ (Choy 169-170, emphasis mine). Iâd extend that to be a breather necessitates that we not only âliveâ in particular âspaces,â as Choy points out, but also that we live in the space of our bodiesâ at the lungs. Thus, that the spatial assemblage of climate actually occurs at the lungs need not depoliticize or de-socialize the processes of power that the lungs in turn inhale, hold, absorb, and expel. In deconstructing the reifications at play in the outside/inside paradigm that so afflicts climate by understanding its mutual spatiality in the lungs, we donât gloss over what was once conceptually âoutside,â but, as we will later see through Povinelli (2017), lay active claim to it on our own terms, and hold responsible systems accountable.
Our first meditation into what âlungs-as-climateâ offers begins with Nicholas Shapiroâs exploration of domestic formaldehyde in âAttuning to the Chemosphereâ (2015). Exploring the volatility of ubiquitous chemicals within âlate industrial material ecologiesâ (Shapiro 369), Shapiro pays particular attention to the way bodies come to understand prolonged, quotidian, domestic chemical exposures. Here toxic chemicals are geographically traced through to their removal point: âas formaldehyde vapors enter these bodies they are absorbed by the mucus membranes of the nasopharynx and lungs, bind to DNA and proteins, disrupt cellular functions, and are quickly dismantled.â (Shapiro 369-370). Here, the lungs, in their absorptive intimacy with formaldehyde, come to quite literally contain the domestic space itself, this late industrial materialityââtheir homes are decomposing into them as they decompose in their homesâ (Shapiro 370). Shapiro goes on to explore this process as one proceeding broadly through somatic apprehension, but in locating the lungs as the actual site where climate is produced, we can recognize more explicitly that bodies donât just live in toxic domestic climates, but that the lungs actually contain toxic domestic climates. While we could certainly turn inside-out the body in any space to understand their mutually composite relationship, I again emphasize that it is important to recognize that it is the lungs, not simply the âbody,â that is engaged in this enacting of climate. The lungs, as the site of absorption, enact climate for the body in ways highly specific to the breather, while also ontologically-implosively containing nearly all domestic spaces that are designed, constructed, and materialized within late capitalism.
The lungs donât just imply a spatiality of climate. In fact, we find that lungs absorb formaldehyde âat the sedate speed of chemical off-gassing and regular human breathingâ (Shapiro 379, emphasis mine), drawing attention to a different temporality at play in pulmonary climate. The morphological specificity of the lungs implies a temporality that is somatically different than one enacted through other parts of the sensorium, such as a hyper-chemically-sensitive hand (Shapiro 383), or a noseâs olfaction. Climate as understood through the lungs by necessity happens over long periods of time, involving temporalities far more directly tied to breath (life) and modes of production (social relations) than, say, a climate of touch (a momentary caress, for example), or indeed a climate of increasing global temperature measured through more disembodied and geologically-bounded variables. Although Shapiro doesnât make it explicit, tending instead towards the âsomaticâ label, he is effectively arguing through the pulmonary climate, productively arming it for us with charges of implosive spatiality and grounded temporal scale.
Having explored with Shapiro an initial spatialization and temporalization of pulmonary climate, we might now trace it in a less localized and domestic example: tear gas. Pulmonary climate finds perhaps its most obvious moment in this weaponized mode of the toxic, which serves as a mode of âexplicationâ of the âbodyâsâ vulnerabilities at first in war (Sloterdijk 33), and later on the streets of protest (Feigenbaum 2017). Despite the emphasis placed by Sloterdijk on the âbody,â and conversely, on the bodyâs âenvironmentâ in the 20th century (Sloterdijk 14), it still seems ambiguous where climate is to be actually found and re-phenomenalized. We do, however, receive a sort of clue: âA Canadian autopsy report on a gassing victim […] stated: â’A considerable amount of a foaming, light yellow substance streamed out of the lungs during removalââ (Sloterdijk 13, citing Martinetz, Der Gas-Krieg 1914-1918). Iâd contend against Sloterdijk that tear gas is not designed for the âenvironmentâ per se, still to be ontologically left âoutside,â but is in fact designed for the climate that the lungs produce. We might now extend our apprehension of the implosive spatiality of the lungs from Shapiroâs domestic meditationâ where the lungs contained, in a way, all domestic space in late industrial capitalismâto understand that the lungs contain, and indeed are, the environment, the whole of the âoutdoorâ space of perpetually warring modernity, in intimate constellation with the violent logics of war, design, and terror. With tear gas, the temporality of climate is once again bounded to that of the lungsâ affectâgas clouds articulate with âconcentration[s] high enough to damage the lungs and respiratory tracts after long periods of exposureâ (Sloterdijk 10, emphasis mine). Pulmonary climate (which is to say, again, our more useful conception of climate) is always bounded on our own respiratory terms, even (and especially) when this âexplicationâ happens through violence. We discover through tear gas that the violence contained in planetary changeâwhat we used to index in our invocations of biospheric âclimateââis most effectively registered spatially and temporally near the breath.
I have thus far only hinted at the ways in which pulmonary (and not just somatic) climate is a politically more productive (re)definition of climate, but will now aim to be more specific. My insistence on morphological specificity lies precisely in Demosâ misidentification of climate as that which is âoutside ofâ our bodies and externally affecting us, or as that which disciplines and therefore subjectifies a radical political collective. Demos writes, âSuch collective struggle is forged in the materiality of oppression, which tear gas, in its negative cast, enacts by chemically joining multiple bodies and geographies of violence, rendering diverse grievances interconnectedâ (Demos 16). Demos is arguing for an understanding of âclimate changeâ registered through tear gas rather than paradigmatic carbon, as the gas makes legible different relations of power enacted by petro-capital that are otherwise missed, while necessarily politicizing and em-bodying what is at stake. In other words, climate for Demos is tear gas. But what both carbon climate and tear gas climate miss is the opportunity to define struggle on our own specific terms, rather than by only that which disciplines. Making climate lung-ified allows us to move from a negative definition of justice, of âstop-tear-gassing-us,â to a starting point of, as Demos invokes, ââwhen we breathe, we breathe togetherââ (16)âsomething that would be less explicit in a general appeal to bodily climate. Regardless of the ways in which petro-capital and regimes of tear gas adapt to our collective confrontation, we are through pulmonary climate always prepared to move forward as a still well-defined collective contingency, one forged not just from our shared identity as âbreathers,â but from our acknowledged and indeed variegated condition of being breathers at the lungs, our spatially and temporally grounded apparatus.
Certainly there are issues with a pulmonarily-conceived climate. Carbon and methane remain generally indescribable by the lungs except by proxy, as do those particles that donât directly enact violence through the mucus membranes. The issues we confront with other conceptions of climateâ too diffuse, not ontologically inclusive enough, or too particularizedâ arenât necessarily solved in this new im/explosive Lung-space. What I hope it does usefully emphasize, however, is that climate is already part of each body, and can be claimed as such. We may not control the entirety of the âair,â but we may attempt to claim this space for the collective social âbodyâ to breath air together, to complicate and construct its contained spatialities, to ground and redefine its temporalities, and to dissolve the stubborn paradigm of inside/outside that inhibits environmental thinking. After all, the lungs are always touching both. I close, then, with Povinelliâs reflections on the inescapable tension and innervation between the carnal and the elemental, a game that happens when climate is the lungs. She writes:
It was a game we playedâwho could run the longest, the closest, to the nozzle spewing the pesticides in great clouds? The trick was not to breathe. To run at full speed without breathing, then to quickly veer away from the cloud when your lungs gave out and your heart began to explode. […] These fires, fogs, and winds were a part of us. They were elemental to what we were because they were the elements that composed us. (Povinelli 505).
If lungs are climate, they need not always partake of pristine air to be alive, though some lungs certainly do more than others, due to violent geographies, state and police violence, regimes of extraction, and global capital. Pulmonary climate doesnât obfuscate this. By claiming the lungs through our collective social body, collectives may effectively claim all that touches and is touched by themâ claiming intimacies and desires with the toxic, getting closer to the damages while also staking the space that is close to us. Occupation of the parks and streets of inside and outside becomes the pertinent political strategy in order to breathe. We can thereafter think through the lungs, holding memory and future burnings, building homes on tiny aeolian groundsâjust as how some plants and microorganisms find formaldehyde a âsource of life-sustaining carbonâ (Shapiro 369). The lungs are a wonderful, inspiring site of engagement to re-politicize climate, as it spills out and in of ourselves. We may perhaps find, then, that the pea has always been planting its fruitful garden in this pandemic, pulmonary climate.
Author Commentary / Liam Seeley
I composed this piece as a midterm essay for Prof. Jerry Zeeâs Anthropologies of Climate and Change in Fall of 2021. At that pointâa few weeks into the first in-person semester in over a year, whose first day culminated in a literal tornadoâ the contents of âclimateâ and âchangeâ were certainly on the mind.
The still ongoing covid-19 pandemic, an emergency that articulates itself through a social-respiratory register, certainly isnât the first moment in which a âpulmonary politicsâ presents itself. Centuries of anti-Black violence have rendered the respiratory the site of a pervasive and embodied dispossession that is foundational to the construction of colonial-capitalist modernity. Garner, then Floyd, and the mobilizations of 2020 have articulated as much.
And so the pandemic flashes simultaneously into the present breath with a history, and with an immense and disproportionate grief. Prof. Rita Segato has called the pandemic a âbig scannerâ that reveals the âtension points in the cracks of the present,â âa present of perpetual dispossession and loss of meaning. This is, Iâd argue, knowable from the lungs. The imperative of speaking of and from a pulmonary epistemology, of knowing from the breath, is betrayed in the smallest of ways by the fog on our glasses when, in a tiny act of care, we step inside with our masks on. When I wrote of a pulmonary politics, all this was inevitably on my mind. And so the cultural-political narrative informed the written technology of narrative, and asked: in our variegated condition of respiratory unwellness, in the explicit logics of a âdiaphragmentedâ reality, what might it look like to breathe collectively?
Narrative is our search for articulating a politics in-the-making; it is a scalable mobilization of language towards the making-explicit of the world, towards the re-presentation of present but often obfuscated phenomenon. Here, the push of narrative is towards some re-knowing of the breath, or of the seeping violence of formaldehyde, a sensuous reorganization that at a different scale reveals a larger political-organizational imperative. But perhaps this appears to be a highly discipline-specific move. That is, certainly not all writing can participate in the technologies of cultural anthropology. Indeed, as a student of âlanguage and cultural studies,â I am lucky enough to find myself reading and citing pieces that actively acknowledge their participation in the world as vehicles for meaning-generation and âthe political.â For other fieldsâthose in which âthe politicalâ is disavowed or rendered invisibleâperhaps narrative is cordoned off and demobilized as the mere âstorytelling.â But every piece we craft is engaged in deep stories, and so too inherently their political contents. It is our job so long as we are communicating to understand our normative commitments, and to give language to them. For me, in this piece, narrative lies latent in the tiny cosmos of an invented and intimate lexicon of lungs.
Narrative is therefore a cosmo-political act, and one we mustnât bear lightly. It is my hope that this piece, selected for ânarrative,â at the bare minimum conforms to this responsibility as Iâve outlined it. Perhaps it is what makes it successful, or so Iâve been told. Regardless of discipline, in writing and in being, we are all students of clouds, social power, sunrises, community, and respiration. To recognize as much whilst in Academia can be a profoundly humanizing and indeed necessary step in our writing, and perhaps towards our collective-beings.
Editor Commentary / Frances Mangina
When I read Liamâs essay, my first thought was that it was a wonderful piece of storytelling. The stories that he referencesâa pea flourishing inside a lung, the insidious effects of formaldehyde and tear gas upon the human bodyâremained in my mind long after I had finished reading. Why, exactly? Perhaps due to the level of detail, or the poetic asides (âsome legumbrious diagnosis. An unexpected vegetable gardenâ), or simply my discomfort at imagining the boundaries of the body violated by foreign substances. If all I gleaned from a traditional academic paper was a compelling story, I would be unsatisfied and wonder whether the author had a motive, argument, and scholarly conversation. However, I soon realized that Liam had achieved these elements of the lexicon through narrative.
Take, for example, Liamâs motive and thesis. A traditional paper might have an in-text, scholarly, or global motive. Generally, this involves beginning with evidence (such as a written text, scientific data, or an academic theory) and then locating some puzzle, question, gap, or disagreement. For his motive, however, Liam begins not with traditional evidence, but rather with the story of the pea. He argues that the pea commits a âtransgressionâ by countering the common assumption that our lungs are interior spaces sealed off from the outside world. Liamâs motive might be rephrased as follows: our current stories about the place of the human body in our changing climate are insufficient. His thesis responds to his motive by positing a new narrative about climate and the body inspired by the transgressive pea: âthe lungs are not the site where climate is sensed or otherwise apprehended, as might be traditionally understoodâratherâŠthe lungs are spatially and temporally climate itself.â Finally, Liam engages with other scholars by critiquing and building on the narratives that they tell about climate. He draws stories from his scholarly sources and then reworks these stories to be more politically productive.
I was particularly struck by Liamâs use of scale and metaphor in the service of narrative. If we removed the metaphor of lungs as climate, the essay would lose its force. It would be making very abstract points about how we should approach climate: as something both external and internal to the body, something over which we have collective agency. While reading such an essay, I would nod along in agreement, and then promptly forget the entire argument. In contrast, Liam does not allow readers to forget, because he fashions a metaphor on an immediately perceptible scale. His argument is that political issues can be observed in microcosm with every breath we take: âlungs sigh, they cough, tighten, sing, grow cancer, or peas, give speeches and chants, they insist and impatiently wait.â Liam therefore invites us to tackle climate change in our day-to-day life, rather than merely in an academic setting.
Narrative and academic argumentation are by no means mutually exclusive. In fact, motive, thesis, and scholarly conversation can be driven by narrative. Most importantly, weaving stories into your academic work will encourage readers to engage directly with your argument and apply it to their daily lives. The next time you write anythingâno matter what the genre or who the audienceâask yourself how your argument might change the way somebody navigates the world, and try to bring this new point of view to life through storytelling.