After Hygiene

When you apply for welfare or go into your dean's office, why does it feel so cold, so chillingly life-sucking, adversarial, and full of hate? Where does that overwhelming, envelopingly atmospheric feeling come from? And what is its history? In other words, why does administrative violence—the way that state institutions and bureaucracies inflict harm and perpetuate inequality under cover of being “normal” processes—feel so aesthetic?Kyla Wazana Tompkins, an interdisciplinary scholar with expertise in nineteenth-century US literature, names these questions, which emerged from a conversation with the late, great José Esteban Muñoz, as the original provocations behind Deviant Matter: Ferment, Intoxicants, Jelly, Rot. In this book, she not only answers them but thinks with ferments, intoxicants, jellies, and rots as types of matter and as materialities—sensual qualities that also describe sensory organization—to both provide and put forth a method of producing histories of the past and present at the scale of the sensory: the aesthetic and affective everyday.Deviant Matter, which comes to its namesake conceptual framework through historical research and close readings, wields insights from Black studies, queer of color critique, Marxist cultural studies, performance studies, biopolitical theory, and human geography to intervene in new materialism and affect studies by centering the marginalized and historicizing that marginalization. It is divided into two sections. Chapter 1 situates the establishment of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) within the context of Reconstruction and settler-colonial westward expansion, analyzing its archives as aesthetic objects to show how in the nineteenth century, “hygiene” came to be a totalizing political project, and a form of governance, a mode of population management across scale—from the national to the microbial. Tompkins's strategy of reading USDA reports for their aesthetic qualities and effects can be understood as a kind of methodological counterconduct, since core to her argument is that “hygiene” derives and maintains its taxonomizing power through alignment with the supposedly non-aesthetic qualities of objectivity, impartiality, rationality, and reasonableness. In the same vein as her writing elsewhere with Tavia Nyong'o about civility as a kind of polite violence that “is thrice as damaging as the direct attack because it gaslights as it wounds” (quoted on 36), in Deviant Matter, Tompkins argues that administrative violence operates as “an affect and an aesthetic that exercises political power by pretending that aesthetics resides elsewhere from itself (in, say, art), in order to uphold its legitimacy and in order to deny political power to those who are deemed unworthy” (208). Hygienic civility, which masquerades as care but isn't, is “the affective and aesthetic register through which the state comes to be experienced as a state” (34). Originating with the emergence of what would become the science of microbiology and what Tompkins elaborates as the ensuant microbiopolitical turn, the taxonomizing logics of hygiene remain the state's dominant mode of operation. These logics, which she argues can be understood as a kind of “police power” that manifests today as carcerality, classify not just things but people too as good/bad, clean/dirty, legal/illegal, normal/deviant, deserving/undeserving—deeming certain populations worthy and relegating others to zones of premature death.Against this backdrop, in the remaining four chapters, Tompkins thinks with and theorizes “deviant materialities”—ferment (chapter 2), intoxicants (chapter 3), rot (chapter 4), and jelly (chapter 5)—as ways of being that are designated “deviant” within this normative system's vicious taxonomy and as modes of lively, interrelated existence that mark the system's limits and point toward its undoing. Importantly for Tompkins, because of the way that the qualities of deviant materialities seem to continually affix themselves to humans deemed less than human—“the fat, the poor, the queer, the Black, the immigrant, and the brown”—thinking with them is a way into theorizing the power of these communities against whom hygiene's taxonomy has also been leveled (7). “Dissident and deviant forms of lively matter,” she writes, are “figures for thinking through the incipient and counterdisciplinary energy of subaltern communities—white working class, Black, Asian, and queer—that the state has sought to manage and contain” (28). This energy, less associated with individual bodies than with what happens between and through them, brews, effervesces, decays, and jiggles with potential. For example, in chapter 2, reading nineteenth century newspapers for the way that fermentation came to be figured as lively crowd energy, Tompkins notes that “when we compare the Police Gazette to African American and abolitionist newspapers in the same period, there is an interesting shift: ‘ferment’ moves from negatively connoting a state of unrest that is in need of swift resolution to a state that may well open up to productive and liberatory political possibilities” (67). And in chapter 5, Tompkins thinks with the gelatinousness of rheological substances—in physics, solids that behave like liquids and vice versa—as a materiality that is historically imbricated with the production of class difference and political inequality and that too, in its fundamental relationality, might hold the key to surviving those uneven conditions and the potential to shift them. Gelatinousness manifests contact as movement, like jellies that wiggle and plop to-and-fro as they dance to music and butts that jiggle, dimple, and deform in responsive movement to the caring touch of another. In guiding us to think with and learn from deviant materialities, Tompkins writes against the policing power of hygiene and toward disinhibited, collective joy.Readers familiar with American studies and ethnic studies scholarship might notice an unnamed kinship between Deviant Matter and Kandice Chuh's The Difference Aesthetics Makes: On the Humanities “After Man” (2019), which likewise takes inspiration from Sylvia Wynter's writings about aesthetics and decoloniality and Jacques Rancière's formulation of politics as constitutively aesthetic in order to theorize ways of being that are the normative's constitutive outside. In service of building out a humanities that is disidentified from liberal humanism, Chuh theorizes the illiberal sensibilities of those who have been deemed less than human to prop up modernity's rational “Man.” It is exciting to imagine what might come from thinking “deviant materialities” and “illiberal sensibilities” together. What might we learn from their shared interest in racialized embodiments and sensations that exceed and disrupt normative schemas of being and feeling, and from their shared refusals of liberal subjectivity and disciplinary containment?A brilliant work of world-unsettling theory, everyone, especially graduate students and early career scholars, should read Deviant Matter. Then read it again. And again. And again. Tompkins's ambitious and densely powerful book demands and rewards it. Stay with this trouble; it is challenging and so good.